The child from Terror's Realm
by Ryuji Takayama
Summary: My fanfiction about Samara Morgan from "The Ring".
1. Introduction

Dear readers, welcome to my story "The child from Terror's Realm", my fanfiction about Samara Morgan from "The Ring". If you're here and reading this little text, it probably means that you like "The Ring" and that you're interested in reading my story, which I'm very thankful for and flattered by. However, before you start reading my work, I'd like to say a few things that I couldn't say in the summary because it allows me to type only 384 characters.

1. I want to apologize in advance for any possible grammar/spelling/vocabulary mistakes. I'm not a native English speaker. If you notice any mistake in the text, I would be very thankful if you let me know.

2. If you're reading this work of mine, it probably means that you're a fan of "The Ring" and that you know very much about the original story. If you find anything illogical in my work, any contradiction to the original story, anything that doesn't make sense, please do let me know! This is VERY important for me and thank you in advance!

3. I want to credit my great friend for the awesome cover image she made for me! She can be find on DeviantART by her username **athdarariddle** . I'm not sure if she has an account on this site.

I think that would be it. I really hope you'll enjoy reading my story.


	2. Prologue

_I wrote this little prose poem much before even thinking about writing a fanfiction, although I had already been a huge fan of "The Ring". The poem is inspired by and dedicated to Samara Morgan. When I developed the concept of this story, I realized that the poem described quite well the main character's feelings for Samara, so I decided to use the poem as the prologue to my story._

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**READ UNTIL THE END!**

**IF YOU DO NOT, YOU WILL BE CONSUMED BY THE DEAD!**

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**Friend**

I share the pain felt by you. You, with your face draped in darkness. That face dried by bitterness and agony that ripped your liveliness apart. My heart used to love the golden masks hiding the faces of evil souls. The last tears of my goodness fell apart in their claws. A rock was the last thing touched by your hand. In the depth of its darkness, your light faded away. The only thing left after you was your rage. That rage that I understand so well, because it's the same one burning in my veins. Along with us, the daylight was seen by our curse and the magnificent gift we never learned to use. It was the determination of our demise. Those names, that used to be the shine and glory of our worlds, exterminated our goodness. Today your grudge is understood and felt by me. That is why you cannot be my fear. I'm holding out my hand to you, I'm inviting you. Come, come to my world! Let our two coldnesses be united! Everyone will suffer! The dried rivers of our tears will be revenged. Come, be my accomplice! Because I am your brother by agony. I am your friend.


	3. Chapter 1

_This chapter introduces us to Seth McWilson, the fearless but very dark and resentful hero of this story, who discovers the mysterious videotape that kills its viewers in seven days. He is the one that's going to introduce us to the mysterious ghost girl and show us the ring of fear in its newest dimension!_

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**The tape**

It was an ordinary autumn day. Seattle was under a heavy rainstorm while I was sitting home alone in the armchair of my living room, eating some onion rings I had baked for myself and watching a Japanese horror movie called _Ju-On: The Grudge_. I liked that title very much, it reminded me of myself. Of the way I felt about the entire world around me.

While I was watching the movie, more sympathizing with the villainess than being terrified by the way she kills innocent humans, I was suddenly interrupted by the ring of a doorbell. I knew who it was. It was David, my best friend. My only friend in this awful universe. As I heard the doorbell sound, I put the bowl with onion rings on the table and pressed the Pause button on the remote controller of my VCR. The movie expectedly froze, showing the picture of a ghost woman covered in blood, as I left the living room and went downstairs to let my friend in.

"Hi, David!" I said, having opened the door.

"Hi, Seth!" David answered, entering the corridor and taking his boots and raincoat off. "I got what we wanted!"

That was one of the very rare moments of true excitement in my life. I knew what my friend was talking about.

He was a member of an internet community called _Rings_. It was a community of people, mostly teenagers, investigating the famous mysterious videotape that kills people seven days after they watch it. Many people thought it was just a high school rumor, but David and the rest of the community knew it was true. They had already found the way to survive the curse of the video. After watching it, a person has seven days to make a copy of the tape and have someone else watch it. If they make it they survive, and then it's up to the other person to find their own new victim.

The first one of those tapes had allegedly appeared precisely in my hometown, Seattle. Members of the _Rings_ community were trying to discover the origin of that video. They usually made deals in advance, knowing exactly who was going to watch the tape after them. The problem was that no one had ever made it past the seventh day. After watching the tape the victim suffers from hallucinations and nightmares, which get worse and worse as the seventh day comes closer. The unusual thing is the fact that those hallucinations could be captured with a camera and shown to a neutral person who otherwise most likely wouldn't see them. As up to that day of David's visit every living _Rings_ member had given the newest copy of the tape to the next victim before the seventh day, they hadn't found out what a person experienced in the deadline moment. The people who saved themselves had missed that experience, and the ones that died couldn't tell what they had seen, heard or felt.

But David played dirty. After watching the tape, he immediately made a copy and showed it to his neighbor, an elder man who had no idea what was it all about. The oldie watched the tape without knowing he was going to die, without knowing what he had to do in order to survive. As he was excellent with technology, David set secret cameras in every single room of the neighbor's house. The poor naive geezer had no idea about it.

That rainy day when David came to visit me was the day when the old man died from the video's curse. After taking his cameras out of the oldie's house, David brought them in a plastic bag to my place, intending to watch the video of his neighbor's death with me. He had decided for me to be the only one to know his dark secret.

He was personally interested in seeing a victim's experience on the day seven. He never let the _Rings_ members know what he had done to survive and how he had driven an innocent old man to death. He knew I was the only one who could understand him, although I had never wanted to get myself involved with the tape. I didn't know who would I ever pass it to, and I didn't want to die. At least not before taking my revenge on the world!

After David's arrival, he and I went upstairs and at first we entered my living room.

"Watching _Ju-On_ again, huh?" He giggled as he saw the frozen picture on my TV set.

"Indeed, Kayako never gets old." I nodded.

"Of course she never gets old, she's a freakin' ghost!" He laughed. "Ghosts don't age anymore."

"Oh, you clown!" I laughed back at him.

"Want some onion rings?" I offered, pointing to the bowl on the table.

"No, thanks, man!" He refused and turned to the door leading to the stairs. "Maybe later. Now I want us to watch what I brought. I didn't want to watch it without you."

"Alright, man, let's go!" I agreed euphorically as we left the living room and went upstairs.

As soon as we came to the upper floor and entered my room, I turned my computer on and David plugged one of his cameras in it. Soon after that, we were finally able to watch the video of his neighbor's death. My friend played the video.

In the video, the old man was sitting in his living room and watching TV. Nothing unusual for a man like him. But all of a sudden, the screen of his TV (set) became static, and a few seconds later a completely new picture appeared. It was a monochromatic picture of an old circular well built of stone. Suddenly, a pair of pale arms, along with a few strands of long black hair, emerged from the well. Someone was coming out. Just a few seconds later, a short woman climbed out through the big circular hole. Her pale arms and bare legs were covered in dirt, just like her torn white dress. Her face was hidden under her long black hair. As soon as I saw her, I recalled David telling me about some theories floating around the _Rings_ community. Some of its members claimed to have seen a little girl in their hallucinations and nightmares, looking just like that, with dirty pale limbs and black hair covering her face. They theorized about the cursed videotape being a portal to her world. Another dimension, alternate reality, something like that. But they were describing her as a _little girl_, while the one in David's video was barely shorter than the old man.

After coming out of the well on the screen, she started to limp forward, getting closer to the camera, as the old man was staring in confusion, puzzled by the fact he was unable to switch the channel or to turn the TV off. When the woman came close enough, with her head apparently touching what was supposed to be the camera filming her eerie walk, the next thing that occurred was the weirdest one. Her hair penetrated through the screen, covering with its length the shelf that the TV set was placed on, and leaking droplets of water onto the floor. The old man gasped in shock, standing up from his armchair and starting to step backwards. A few seconds later, the woman's entire body crawled out of the TV into the real space of the living room. Her appearance was monochromatic and as bright as the screen, quivering like the recording of an old and damaged videotape. The old man suddenly dropped down in terror. His movements seemed to be almost completely disabled by his enormous fear. He started to crawl backwards as the woman stood up and started to walk towards him, leaving wet tracks of her feet. Her pale and dirty wrinkled skin looked dead, she looked like a walking corpse.

Several seconds later, the crawling man touched the wall with his back. He had nowhere left to go. The woman then raised her head, thus moving her hair aside and revealing her face. It happened to be as dirty as her arms and legs, with more wrinkles than the face of the man in front of her. She had bags under her undead blue eyes whose stare made the old man let his last scream. His face was suddenly distorted, his skin looked like melting away. As soon as his face transformed in such an eerie way, the undead woman disappeared and the TV screen became static again. The old man stood up, obviously not understanding what had just happened and being unaware of the terrifying look of his face. A few seconds later, he just dropped on his sofa, with his mouth wide opened. The movement of his opened eyes froze. His distorted motionless face had the expression of shock. He was dead.

As there was nothing left to see, David stopped the video. But I kept staring at the motionless screen, completely dumbstruck by what I had just seen. No, I wasn't terrified by the way my friend had purposefully driven an innocent old man to death. I wasn't terrified by the victim's distorted dead face either. I wasn't really scared, but very surprised by the undead person emerging from the TV. I had no idea who she was, what had happened to her and why the members of _Rings _described her as a little girl when she was an adult. Though, what I was really impressed by was her behavior. That stare in her undead blue eyes was a picture speaking more than a thousand words. A deep feeling burned inside my intuition was telling me that she was really dead. She had once really existed and she had died. I couldn't tell how, but I knew that. From that very moment, I knew I was never going to forget that resentful glare in her undead eyes. In them I saw her grudge, her resentment towards the entire world. That's what her lost soul must have felt. If it hadn't been so, she surely wouldn't have stared that way at an innocent old man, she wouldn't have sent him to death. In those eyes I saw my own feelings for the awful world around me, I saw my true self. What could have happened to that girl, or that woman, I wondered, who on Earth would have purposefully killed her and why? How did her soul manage to manifest itself on the screen and emerge out in the form of a walking corpse? How is that phenomenon connected to the mysterious cursed videotape?

"Seth! Hey, Seth!" David's voice brought me down to Earth a few seconds after the video was over.

"Oh, yes?" I replied, turning to him.

"Don't tell me you got scared, man!" He laughed, obviously having mistaken the expression of my almost motionless face. "Not you, Kayako lover!"

"Oh, you clown!" I scolded him. "I'm not scared. I'm... fascinated. Tell me, David, how were you able to take those cameras out of his house without getting caught?"

"Well, my parents were friends with the geezer, he fully trusted them, and so he fully trusted me too." He explained. "I managed to make a copy of his key two weeks ago. I knew when he was going to die, so I entered his house right after that and took the cameras away."

"What about your fingerprints, man? You're in danger after what you did, you know?"

"I'm not in danger, silly!" He laughed. "My family was visiting him quite often. So if they find out that I was in his house, it's not going to be suspicious. Besides that, we know that he died of myocardial infarction, no one can prove it was another human's fault. They can't accuse me for having him watch a videotape, man, please!"

"Alright." I shrugged. "What did you do with the tape?"

"I took it away, of course. It's here, in my bag."

"It's here?!" I exclaimed in excitement. "May I have it, David?"

"What do you want to do with it, man?" He kept laughing. "You said you didn't want to get involved with it at all."

"I changed my mind." I answered. "Now I want to watch it."

There was a reason why I wanted to watch it. I had seen how the old man had died. He actually died from fear after seeing the undead woman. It was understandable, almost everyone would die from fear after seeing a walking corpse emerging from a TV screen. But I knew it was not going to happen to me. Especially when I knew exactly what the woman's manifestation looked like, I was ready to see her and I knew she wouldn't be able to scare me to death. I wanted to watch the tape because I wanted to meet her personally.

"Are you nuts?!" David asked. "Why would you put yourself in such a danger? We finally know what a victim experiences in the moment of death. What more do you want to know and why?"

"Don't worry about me! I know what I'll do and I know how I'm going to survive."

"Well, tell me!" He asked curiously.

"I'm going to tell you when it's all over." I said, assuming he wouldn't understand my idea before everything was done. "You're going to understand. Can I have the tape?"

"As you wish, man." David shrugged and handed me a videotape from his bag.

It looked like a regular tape. It was all black, with no label or anything that could indicate its content.

"Thanks, David!" I smiled. "You can have it back in... seven days."

"No hurry, man." He shrugged. "I have one more."

"Great! Be careful with those cameras, man! If anyone finds the videos of your deceased neighbor, you're in a big trouble."

"I'm not a moron, Seth! Of course I'm going to be careful. I keep everything regarding the videotape in a vault that only I can open."

"Alright, so I'm not in danger."

"Of course you're not! I may be a heartless bastard, but even if something happened to me, I wouldn't drag a friend down with myself."

"That's nice to know." I smiled, nodding to him.

David spent a few more hours at my house. It was seven o'clock when he went home, leaving me alone. In fact, he did not leave me _alone_. He left me with the videotape. With that magical item that could bring me close to the one who could truly understand my grudge against the entire world.

As David left, I took the tape and went to my living room. I ejected my _Ju-On: The Grudge_ tape from my VCR and replaced it with the unlabelled one. Then I sat in my armchair and pressed the Play button on the remote. The video started to play.

At first I saw a completely black screen, but in a few seconds it was replaced with the first moving image – a ring of white light on a pitch black background, accompanied by a strange humming noise, unlike anything I had heard before. I had no idea what that ring was, but it came to my mind it might have been the inspiration for the name of the internet community – _Rings_. However, the ring disappeared in a few seconds and the screen went static.

It took the video another few seconds to show a new image. That image, accompanied by a rumbling noise, was some wavy dark water contaminated with some unknown red liquid. Possibly blood. The rumbling noise was still there when the screen changed to a motionless monochromatic image of a small wooden chair on a blank background.

Afterwards I saw a quite unusual moving image. It looked like some white fingers with claws sliding down a black texture similar to a woman's hair. Then suddenly, a monochromatic image of an oval mirror, containing a moving image of an adult black haired woman brushing her hair. A child's voice was heard, singing a song with indistinctive lyrics. For a moment I thought the woman on the screen was the living form of the undead one. But the following sequence proved me wrong. The mirror suddenly moved from the right to the left side of the screen, showing the adult woman no longer. As it appeared on the left side, it showed a little girl in a white dress, with long black hair covering her face. She was apparently being consumed by some dark fog behind her. That was undoubtedly the same person I had seen emerging from the old man's screen. In that mysterious video she did look like a little girl, just like the members of _Rings _had said, but her limbs were not wrinkled or covered in dirt. I was even more confused when I saw that image, wondering why she had looked so different by manifesting herself to the old man.

The mirror then went back to the right side of the screen, showing the adult woman again. She turned her head to left, like smiling at the little girl. She might have been her mother. Then for a short moment I saw a vertically standing spike with a droplet of blood sliding down. Next, a quivering monochromatic image of a house, recorded from the perspective of a person standing outside and looking up to it. An adult man was standing at the window. That was the sequence where the singing child's voice faded out.

But the rumbling noise remained as the screen switched to another monochromatic image. It was a cliff next to the ocean. There was a small tree on the left side and a fly flying across the picture. Suddenly, a quite disturbing monochromatic image of an inhuman head vomiting an unknown thick white thread out. An intestine, umbilical cord or something. The sequence was accompanied by a sudden gurgling noise.

Then, for a very brief moment the video showed something that looked like a black nylon, and played a loud sudden noise which was stopped in the moment when the nylon image disappeared from the screen.

Afterwards I saw another strange image, too short to be fully recognized, looking a bit like a solar eclipse. It was followed by a little longer moving image of a burning tree. Then a short image of a finger being impaled by a spike and getting its nail torn out. That image came along with an irritating high pitched noise that accompanied the next few sequences.

The following image was a very ugly monochromatic one of tons of maggots squirming around. A few seconds later, the maggots transformed into dozens of humans looking like drowning in water. The next sequence was just a little less disturbing. A black table with a glass of water on it. The chair next to the table was moving itself aside. A giant centipede suddenly appeared and squirmed away from underneath the table. Suddenly, a probably injured lamb limping into a barn. Then I saw a blinking eye of an animal. I wasn't sure what animal it was. Then another image of what looked like a solar eclipse to me. It was followed by a disturbing image. Several human fingers, looking like cut or bitten off the hands, moving inside a rectangular box. Then the burning tree again. The black nylon again, accompanied by the same noise that had been there in its previous appearance.

The high pitched noise finally faded out as the oval mirror appeared again. But that time, there wasn't only the reflection of the adult woman in it. The woman was also standing in front of the mirror, untying her hair and turning her back to the wall to look at what I thought was the camera filming her. The house again, that time without the man at the window, accompanied by a whistle or a similar sound. The small wooden chair again, just turned upside down and spinning around. Then a ladder placed against a wall. Next, a dark image of several dead horses lying on a shore and getting hit by water waves whose sound was intertwined with the previously heard child's voice singing.

The singing voice disappeared in the next sequence showing the cliff again. But that time there was no fly. Instead, there was an adult woman in a black dress, dropping herself off into the ocean. Suddenly, a brief image of a ladder falling down. Another short image of the eclipse, that time forming the ring of white light from the beginning of the video. The ladder dropping down, accompanied by an unusually silent thud noise. And the last image was there. It was the well. The same one I had seen on the old man's screen. After its disappearance, the screen went static. The video was over.

I was confused, but unusually unimpressed by all those strange images from the video. After everything I had heard about that tape, I expected something much, much scarier. Then suddenly, my phone rang. I knew it was going to happen. Whenever someone watches the tape, the phone rings and after it happens the viewer has seven days left to live, unless they manage to make a copy of the tape and have someone else watch it within that week.

"Hello?" I said after picking up the phone.

A second of dead silence. Then I heard the voice. A whisper of an eerie voice, sounding like something from the other world.

"Seven days." It whispered in my ear.


	4. Chapter 2

_It's been seven days since Seth watched the deadly videotape. He is convinced he's going to survive the meeting with the mysterious ghost girl. Is that really going to happen, or is he going to be no exception among the unlucky people who didn't manage to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else in their seven days? This chapter has the answer to that question!_

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**The seventh day**

Seven days passed from the day I watched the mysterious tape and received that short phone call. Within that week several strange things happened, but nothing that could truly terrify me.

The first thing happened only one day after I watched the tape. I walked to my bedroom, intending to take my wallet and go to a store. But when I entered the room, I saw a ladder placed against the wall. The wall of _my own_ room. At first I was confused by what I saw, knowing that I was home alone and that it surely hadn't been there when I entered the bedroom the previous time. But then I remembered what the people from the _Rings_ community said. According to the theories founded by them, a ladder is the first hallucination one has after watching the tape. It was a hallucination. When I came home half an hour later, it wasn't there anymore.

In the next few days I was having more hallucinations. The most frequent one was a ring. I was seeing rings made of light, ring-shaped water tracks and lots of similar visions. The name of the internet community made much more sense with that. Also, I often found myself imagining some unusual sights for an unknown reason. For example, I was often thinking about running horses. I had no idea why was such a thing in my head, knowing that horses had never had any particular meaning in my life. I was also quite frequently visualizing myself sitting on a chair and looking at a camera recording me from a few meters away, and some other things completely unrelated to my life that far. Also, a few times I caught my hand unconsciously drawing black hair on human faces in magazines and newspapers lying somewhere around at the moment. It probably had something to do with the hair of the mysterious undead woman that had scared David's neighbor to death.

Besides those strange hallucinations and thoughts, I also had some weird dreams. In one of those dreams I was walking through my house and seeing the maggots from the mysterious video. They were appearing out of nowhere and squirming everywhere around me. I was sure that such a dream would be a nightmare for everyone else. But I was completely indifferent about it. In another one of my dreams, I was vomiting an electrode attached to strands of long dark hair, probably belonging to the mysterious woman. But instead of scaring me that dream only reminded me of how excited I was about meeting her. The scariest dream I had, though, was the one when I vomited a giant centipede out. But not even that one could truly creep me out. It left me completely indifferent after waking up, just like all those apparently senseless thoughts and hallucinations.

But there was something I was confused about. I remembered many members of _Rings_ mentioning the girl herself appearing in their hallucinations and nightmares. For some reason I didn't see her, not a single time, in those seven days of pure excitement.

Within that week I made a copy of the tape, just as people said it had to be done. By making that copy and watching all those moving images again, it came to my mind that none of the images revealed the way of surviving that mysterious curse. The phone call neither. The only two words I had heard over the phone were _Seven days_. After hearing those words, I asked who I was talking to, but there was no answer. So I wondered who was the discoverer of the way of surviving and how had they figured it out.

After making the copy, I had two identical deadly videotapes, but I didn't show anyone any of them. At least not during my seven days. Instead, I left both of them on my desk, with a message written on a piece of paper. The message was the following:

_Dear girl from the tape,_

_I don't know who you are and unfortunately I don't know almost anything about you. I don't even know your name yet. But you probably know that I watched the tape. And I want you to know that I watched it for only one reason. That is because I want to meet you. I believe that I'm going to survive our meeting, although no one else has made it before. I don't know what happened to you, but when I saw your face on that video filmed by my friend, I could see the grudge and resentment in your eyes. I completely understand your feelings because that's more or less how I feel about the entire world around me. If I survive our meeting, I'm willing to make tons of copies of your tape and show them to lots of people. Everyone will suffer, I know. But that's what this world deserves._

_Sincerely yours,_

_Seth_

As my parents were still off to their business trip, I just left that note next to the tapes on my desk, knowing that nobody was going to see it. Eventually the girl from the video, whose soul was probably somewhere around since the day I had watched the tape given to me by David.

I remember it was raining heavily on my seventh day, just like it had been a week ago when David had brought me the tape. It was 6:50 PM on that seventh day of mine when I sat in front of my TV. That same TV that I had watched the tape on. Ten minutes before my deadline moment. Waiting for the undead woman to come, I was wondering about the way she would kill a victim who didn't have a TV around in the deadline moment. Would she find another way to manifest herself or would the victim die in some other way?

However, the expected thing started to happen eight minutes later. My TV screen became static and a few seconds later the well appeared. I didn't try to switch the channel or to turn the TV off. After all, there was nothing for me to be scared of. So instead of trying to fight the mysterious event, I stood up and walked closer to the screen, observing the woman climbing out of the well. For a short moment I thought of how fascinated I was with my own bravery. I really wasn't afraid at all. Just enormously excited as my mysterious idol was walking through her monochromatic realm, straight forward to me. When she came close enough, I held out my hand to the screen. I wanted her to see that I was waiting for her, that meeting her was my goal. I wanted my gestures to be a proof of that, because I couldn't be sure if she had read my note.

But suddenly an unexpected thing happened. Instead of penetrating through the screen with her wet hair first, she raised her right arm and touched my hand. I shivered in cold, vicious excitement as my own eyes saw her demonic undead arm emerging from my screen. I saw the brightness of the electronic screen fade out of her arm, making it look and feel more material and realistic. I felt the damp, freezing cold touch of her wrinkled adult hand. I looked at her fingers, just before they bent over my hand. She had no nails, they had been torn out. There were only holes. I felt her coldness penetrating through the skin of my hand and flowing through every single corner of my veins. But it wasn't an unpleasant feeling. It was refreshing, it was just the same coldness that had been burning for years deep inside the icy volcano of my soul.

Feeling the grip of her hand on mine, I stepped backwards, pulling her easily as she stepped out of the screen. I saw her left foot coming after her right one. Her cold skin was wrinkled, pale and covered in dirt. The premonition I had had after seeing her in the video filmed by David hadn't been wrong at all. She was dead. The coldness and gray color of her skin couldn't lie. But just as I had imagined, I wasn't scared at all. I was just confused and fascinated at the same time, wondering why she sometimes appeared as a little girl and sometimes as a grownup woman a bit shorter than me, and how was her soul able to manifest itself on a screen and emerge from it in a material form of a walking dead body. I was also fascinated by the nimbleness of her joints, which were supposed to have become stiff soon after her death. Her movements were making her look somehow alive and much different from usual walking corpses that could be seen in horror movies.

I looked at the droplets of water falling off her soaking wet corpse down to my floor as she started to raise her head. That second seemed like an eternity to me, with my heart beating in cold excitement while her right hand was lying over mine. When her wet and unruly black hair moved aside, I saw her face. That same face I had seen in David's video. It was all gray and covered in wrinkles. I felt the grudge she held against all of mankind as the stare of her wide opened undead eyes was penetrating through my flesh deep into my cold resentful soul. For some reason, at that moment I had a brief flashback of some of the images from the tape.

A few seconds of dead silence. She and I were quietly staring at each other. There was no mirror around, but I was quite sure that the skin of my face wasn't melting away and that I was not dying. Several seconds later, I raised my left hand and placed it over her right one lying on mine. In spite of all the resentment inside both of us, she was most likely able to perceive the physical warmth of my living body.

"Hello!" I said, smiling at her.

She was still quiet. Her facial expression was still revealing her anger. I thought she wasn't angry at me, though. She was angry at the world, I assumed, just like me. For a brief moment I looked at the TV. The monochromatic picture of the well was still there. But in the next second, I was struck with an enormous shock. All of a sudden, she jumped backwards and her body started to get sucked into the TV set. As our hands were still holding each other, I was getting sucked in together with her. In that short but apparently endless moment, I found myself unable to separate my hands from her one. I felt the indescribable feeling of my body penetrating through the hard surface of the screen and entering her mysterious realm. That feeling would probably be eerie, maybe even traumatizing for any human being but me.

Right after getting sucked in, I suddenly found myself feeling freezing cold as the entire sight around me had become monochromatic. That was the moment when I found out what it felt like to be color blind. I couldn't remember the moment when the position of my and the woman's body changed, but by entering her cold virtual world I was forced in a sitting position, with my back pushed against the well, feeling the uncomfortable touch of its irregularly shaped cold rocks. She was bent above me, with her hands gripping my shirt as her hair was hanging above my legs and leaking droplets of water on my trousers. Her undead face was staring at me with a mysterious expression. I couldn't say if that was rage or surprise. Or maybe the fear that I was the one expected to feel. I also spotted an apparently endless forest of leafless birch trees.

"Who... are you?" The woman asked me in her eerie undead voice. That was the same voice I had heard over the phone seven days ago.

"My name is Seth McWilson." I answered.

"I know your name." She said indifferently, still holding my shirt. "Why were you the only one saved?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe because I wasn't afraid of you. Maybe because I made a copy of the tape. Or because... I share your grudge against mankind."

"You..." She said as I noticed the surprise dominating over all the other dark emotions on her face. "You are... alive. Do you know... what that means for me?"

I knew how she felt about it. I wasn't sure if it was just my intuition, or was she somehow projecting her thoughts into my mind. She felt defeated. The ability of torturing and killing humans who watched her video was the only power she had, her only way to harm mankind after getting thrown down the well by a loved one. And I survived. She could still kill me with her powers, but I hadn't just died on my own after encountering her. That was making her feel like a loser. She lost _again_! I wasn't sure how were those confusing thoughts finding their way to my mind, but something was making me sure it was exactly how she felt about the situation.

"Please, don't feel defeated!" I told her. "I... don't want to harm you. I share your pain, I want to help you! And I want you to help me."

"What... do you think you can do for me?" She asked, still in her undead voice. I was able to understand why that voice would scare any human except me to death.

"Well, we will see, right?" I answered. "If you tell me what happened to you, maybe I will know what I can do for you."

"Who do you think you are?" She asked, sounding a little angry again. "What makes you think that you deserved to know my truth? One person knew. And that person rejected me."

"I am the one who hates mankind just like you." I answered. "I am the one who understands and shares your grudge and your resentment. I am the one who watched the tape and survived your curse. I am the one who wanted to meet you."

"How come you... _wanted _to meet me?" She asked, sounding very curious.

"What do you find so strange about that?" I was curious too.

"You are the only one... who ever really _wanted_ to have me around."

I didn't know what emotions were hidden under those apparently indifferent words pronounced by her.

"Does that make me worthy of knowing more about you?" I insisted, smiling at her.

As I asked that, she suddenly put her hands off my shirt. Then she stood up, thus stopping being bent over me. I saw her hair falling over her chest again. She made a few steps and sat by my left side, also leaning against the well. I looked down as she took my left hand in her right one. In that mysterious monochromatic realm, her dead arm wasn't _that _different from my living one. Just a few seconds later, her memories mysteriously started to play as a movie inside my mind, as if she was projecting her thoughts into my head while the fingers of our hands were intertwined together. Her memories became so vivid that I felt like hypnotized, like living my past again. Her past, in fact, which felt like mine. I felt as if I was becoming her. Suddenly in my mind I was her. She was me.


	5. Chapter 3

_The ghost girl is projecting her memories into Seth's mind and leading us through her past, for the very first time told from her own point of view. In this chapter she lets us know about her early childhood, from her birth to the day when... well, you will see._

* * *

**The memories: From the cradle to the well**

I found myself being a newborn baby at a women's shelter. For some unknown reason, unlike any other newborn human in the world, I was aware of everything around me, able to perceive humans and objects in my surroundings. But I was also aware of something I was sure no human had ever experienced before. It was some unknown dark force that I felt inside myself. I had a premonition that something was going to take over my body and my soul, to make me a powerful, but evil humanlike creature. I was afraid of it.

My mother Evelyn was a very beautiful girl. She was only 17 when she gave birth to me. As a baby I was physically unable to move like a grownup, but I could hear a lot of conversations that Evelyn had with the nuns at that women's shelter called St. Mary Magdalen. From those conversations I learned a lot about my mother.

Evelyn was not an ordinary human. She was psychic and clairvoyant. The nuns disbelieved most of the things she was saying, but I knew they were true. As she was clairvoyant, she was sensitive to the ghostly activity. So she knew there was a powerful ghost creature in water. A demonic creature that had died a few millennia ago. What ordinary humans never knew was the fact that water was the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Regular humans couldn't perceive that demonic ghost in water. No one knew about it.

But Evelyn could sense it, because of her clairvoyance. Once when she went to the sea, she sensed the demonic energy. That demon from water impregnated her that day. During her pregnancy she had visions and hallucinations that made her understand what had happened to her.

The things she was saying to the nuns made me understand my existence. I was a hybrid of a human being and a demonic ghost. The demonic part of my origin was the reason why I was aware of everything, already at my baby age. That dark force inside me was a portal to the world of the dead. I understood it when Evelyn said that the dead never dreamed, but only watched for a way back. She also said that the demon was going to come for me from the waters of the world beyond this one.

I understood what it meant. My father's ghost was going to possess my body, to kill the human goodness I had inherited from Evelyn and make me an evil and powerful creature. The human in me was afraid of that. I didn't want that dark force to take over me. Evelyn was a light of hope for me, my intuition was telling me that she was the only one that could possibly set me free of that darkness inside me, although I knew there was only one way to set me free. To kill me. I knew I could be set free of that evil only if I died. So whenever Evelyn would hold me in her arms, I would try to tell her to take my life away. My baby mouth was unable to speak, but my thoughts were powerful enough to project themselves into her clairvoyant mind. She knew what I was trying to tell her, but at first she was ignoring me. Of course, what mother would deliberately kill her baby?

Evelyn owned an interesting scrapbook where she was collecting pictures. Most of the pictures she had collected were the ones she had found in newspapers, the ones which reminded her of the temporary situation, of her temporary mood or her unclear foresights. There was an image of a mother holding her baby on the cover. That most likely resembled her motherhood. On the first page she had written:"For Samara". That was my first name. I also had a middle name Evelyn, like my mother's first name.

I could remember some of the pictures from that book. For example, there was a glued picture from a magazine, showing several humans arranged in a circle, looking like worshipping a deity, or a demon. It reminded Evelyn of the demon that had impregnated her. There were some pictures of water, which she had put there because they reminded her of where the demon that had impregnated her had come from. There was also a picture of a fetus in a womb, which obviously reminded her of her pregnancy. There were several pictures of mothers holding their babies. She seemed to be obsessed with motherhood. Also, there was a picture of a dead woman lying in water, which reminded Evelyn of water being the barrier between the two worlds. In that book she also had a photo of herself holding me. The last thing I remembered from there was a newspapers article about a female baby found in a bathtub. Evelyn had put it there because it was giving her an inexplicable, but strong foresight. There was something I disliked about that piece of paper. It was giving me a bad premonition. Foresight seemed to be a paranormal power I had inherited from Evelyn, but all my foresights were rough and unclear. And I hadn't inherited her clairvoyance.

I was a baby that everyone around me was confused about. They found me very strange because I almost never cried. I was unable to tell them that I had been born with a full developed intellect, aware of everything that was going on in my surroundings. The only situations when I would cry were the ones when Evelyn would try to bathe me. No one could understand why I was afraid of water. I was unable to tell them, because I could project my thoughts only into Evelyn's mind, due to her clairvoyance. So no one understood my fear of water, because they couldn't see what I sensed in that awful colorless liquid. That invisible demon that was taking over my body more and more whenever it would get in touch with water. I could sense it although I wasn't clairvoyant, because I had been conceived by it.

As my fear was growing along with the evil force inside me, the thoughts I was projecting into Evelyn's mind were becoming stronger and more vivid, until the moment when she finally accepted to grant my wish. She accepted to kill me. But she chose the worst possible way to do it. One night she took me from my cradle and sneaked out to the hospital's yard. There was a big white oval fountain full of water. _Water! That hideous liquid thing! _She intended to _drown_ me to death.

While she was bringing me closer to the water, I heard a song. I didn't know where it came from, but I memorized its short lyrics very easily. It said: _Round we go, the world is spinning. When it stops, it's just beginning. Sun comes up, we laugh and we cry. Sun goes down and then we all die. _

That song left an inexplicable impact on me, especially because I was unable to figure out where it was coming from. I just knew I heard it while Evelyn was bringing me closer to the water to kill me. It was like a foresight or something similar. The lyrics were probably also projected into Evelyn's mind.

But that night when I was supposed to die, the invisible demon in water was stronger and madder than ever before. It probably knew that Evelyn had the intention of killing me and eradicating its influence from the face of Earth. It had different plans for me. At the moment when Evelyn brought me in touch with water, the demon entered my body and my soul. It attacked me from the inside, making the evil in me dominate over my good conscience. The first thing that grew stronger in me was my fear and my power of projecting thoughts. My horrifying thoughts were forcefully projected into Evelyn's mind. But that time it wasn't just thoughts. It was also emotions. My fear was projected into her, so strong that in those few seconds she lost her sane mind. Because of my power that I was unable to control in those moments, she perceived the demon entering me, she perceived it so vividly that she couldn't take it anymore. She was not the same person anymore and I knew her change was permanent. Unfortunately, the nuns saw her try to drown me and they forcefully prevented her from doing so. Evelyn was locked away in a mental institution.

But me... I was not the same person anymore either. That night, the water demon won the war. I lost the strength and the desire to fight. I made peace with the darkness inside me, thus letting it become a full part of me. I didn't want to die anymore. I started to like being possessed by my father. It was not only making me evil. It was also making me powerful. It was making me feel I was destined to bring an eternal agony to mankind. What a wonderful destiny was planned for me by that mysterious demonic creature from water!

For some reason I preserved my memories, the demon didn't bring any of its own by possessing me. It might have been so because it had been dead for millennia and forgotten everything it had experienced while being alive, or maybe because it had never been human, or maybe not even from this planet. It only changed my personality and replaced my human goodness with magnificent inhuman powers.

The nuns had no idea about what was happening inside me. So they gave me for adoption, together with some Evelyn's possessions including her scrapbook. But before they found adopters for me, I heard them talking about Evelyn. They said that the incident of her trying to drown me had somehow reached the media. One of them said the media were writing such misinterpretable articles, which were going to make many superstitious women want to talk to Evelyn if anything went wrong with their kid, because they would come to believe their child was possessed by a demon just like hers.

I was finally adopted by Richard and Anna Morgan, the owners of a big horse farm on Moesko Island. They didn't change the name I had been given at the women's shelter, they kept calling me Samara. Richard never really loved me. He accepted to adopt me just because Anna desperately wanted to have a child, after several miscarriages she had had. He only loved his horses. Anna did love me at first. She was surprised, though, when I showed her my power of telekinesis, another one of my inhuman powers. I made her familiar with it by moving jacks and some more toys without touching them. But Anna wasn't scared, unlike Richard who I noticed dissimulating his aversion to me in front of her.

But I wasn't satisfied with the amount of love I was receiving from Anna. Before meeting her, I had lived with Evelyn, my biological mother, until the demon completely possessed my soul. Although I ended up allowing it to turn me into an inhuman monster, the feelings I used to have for Evelyn never disappeared. I just gave them to another person. To Anna, my new mother. But just like Richard, she also loved the horses. She loved them too much. So much that she wasn't paying her full attention to me, she wasn't spending every single second of her time with me. That was unacceptable.

Whenever she would pay her attention to anything that wasn't me, I would punish her. I had my power of projecting thoughts. After getting possessed, I had become able to use that power on anyone, not only on clairvoyant humans, and even on physical surfaces. So whenever I wasn't in the center of Anna's attention, she would start suffering from gruesome visions and hallucinations. I would usually force her to visualize images like a fountain of blood with humans screaming around it, dead horses covered in blood, slashed horse cadavers walking... She was even seeing that kind of images in her nightmares, because I never slept. I was a being that never needed to sleep. That was because I was possessed by a dead demon. And as Evelyn usually said, the dead didn't dream. But unlike me, Anna did need her sleep. And while she was sleeping, she couldn't pay attention to me, so I had to give her nightmares. I knew that my actions were driving my poor mommy crazy. But I just couldn't let Richard and his hideous animals take that new mother away from me! No, Anna was mine. Only mine!

But she wasn't the only one suffering from my rage. I was also punishing Richard. If it hadn't been for him and his disgusting animals, Anna would have been completely mine. So I was also using my powers on him, giving him the same kind of hallucinations and nightmares. Also, as I hated the horses because they were stealing Anna's attention away from me, several times when an event with them was organized, I would project an enormous amount of irrational rage into the riders' minds. The horses would be disturbed by their negative energy and throw them off. And even that wasn't all. The entire island was affected by my rage. There were many fires, the harvests were lean, the catches were small... I was mostly causing those kinds of disasters with my telekinesis while being outside.

I was seven years old when I was admitted to Eola County Psychiatric Hospital on the mainland, where I had been referred to by Doctor Grasnik, the only doctor on the island. I spent several awful months there. The first thing that annoyed me was flies I was encountering quite frequently. But that was just the first and the most insignificant problem. The doctors were studying me out, and some of them were very disrespectful with me, talking to me almost as if I was a laboratory rat. That was because they had it clear I was far from a normal human being, although they couldn't even imagine the kind of creature I really was.

I could have used my powers and run away from that place, but it would have been useless because I couldn't have returned to the island on my own. Besides that, although I awfully missed Anna, at first I was curious about what those humans could find out about my inhuman nature. That was why I didn't immediately punish them for treating me almost like a monster.

I was through many of their studies and some of them were performed by an employee known as Doctor Scott. He was the one that found out I was not an ordinary girl. Though, of course, he wasn't able to get through to the real point of my existence. He just found out some irrelevant facts, like the one that I was insensitive to physical pain.

During my time at the hospital I found several pieces of X-ray film and I projected some pictures from my mind onto them. The doctors gave a name to that power of mine – projected thermography. That was their term for my power of projecting thoughts into other human's minds or onto physical surfaces.

The X-ray pictures I made were a mixture of some images I had seen and randomly recalled, and of abstract visualization of some my unclear premonitions. So there were images of Anna, her comb, her hairbrush, some jacks, a centipede, a rocking horse on water waves, rings of white light, dinosaur skeletons, a phone receiver, a decapitated human, a human body needled with injection syringes and a leafless tree. The images of Anna and her hairdressing tools were something I had previously seen, just like the jacks I had sometimes been playing with in the house and centipedes which were very common on Moesko Island. But I didn't understand the rest of them at first. They resembled my unclear foresights and the most vivid one of them was the leafless tree.

Almost five months after my arrival to the hospital, Doctor Scott found out that I never slept. By that time I was already tired of that place, I wanted to go away. I remember the day when that doctor was sitting at his desk in front of the chair I was sitting on, filming me with his camera and asking me questions about my constant insomnia and about my X-ray pictures. But I just didn't feel like talking to him anymore, although he wasn't as bad as some other ones. I just wanted to go and be with Anna. I missed her very bad after three months without seeing her. She had probably been convinced by Richard not to come to visit me during all that time.

So in front of that doctor I pretended to be a shy and clueless little girl who didn't know anything about her inhuman powers. I was doing it by looking down all the time, by avoiding answering the majority of his questions and by giving very short and confusing answers to the questions I decided not to ignore.

"I don't... make them. I see them. Then... they just... are." I said after he asked me how I had made the X-ray pictures.

I probably managed to make him feel pity for me. At the age of eight I was an excellent manipulative actress. But he expectedly didn't understand my words and thus disbelieved me, so I started to say that I wanted to see my mommy. When I mentioned her, he dared to point out that I was hurting her. I pretended I never did such a thing on purpose, blaming it all on my evil powers that I was allegedly unable to control. I said they just wouldn't stop hurting everyone around me. I also said that _daddy_ was going to leave me there. The doctor said that daddy loved me. What on Earth did _he_ know, I wondered. But I just said that daddy only loved his horses and wanted me to go away. I wanted the doctor to think that I was tortured by Richard, because I never liked my adoptive father anyway and I only wanted to be with Anna. The doctor kept talking back to me, claiming that Richard loved me.

"But he doesn't know." I said and the doctor didn't know what I was referring to. But I did know. I was ready to ruin Richard's life if he kept preventing me from being with Anna. The doctor asked what it that my daddy didn't know was. But that was a question that I didn't want to answer and I suddenly found myself annoyed by the doctor and that interview he was having with me. I finally decided it was enough. So I raised my head for the first time and looked at the camera, using my powers to turn it off. And that was not all. I also used telekinesis to influence his heart, to make it stop beating. Doctor Scott died in a few seconds, right in front of me.

The other doctors, already terrified by me, suspected that Doctor Scott's death had been my fault. So I was heavily medicated by them. For staff's safety, they said. Then I came to understand why I had seen syringes in my foresight. Unfortunately, I was unable to kill the entire staff like I had killed Doctor Scott. I couldn't do them all at the same time and while I would have been focused on one of them, the others would have disabled me with medications. But that was why I had seen a decapitated human in my foresight. It had been a visualization of my upcoming desire to take those doctors' lives. Being overpowered by humans felt so disgusting that I just felt like throwing up.

Something more than two months later, Anna was admitted to the same hospital where I was, due to depression and suicidal thoughts. She must have felt guilty for leaving me there. During that time, the doctors were mostly keeping me medicated, which was why I was weak and unable to use my powers. And they didn't give me a chance to spend time with Anna while we both were there.

In a few weeks Richard for some reason requested my sessions to be terminated. Against the doctors' protests, he checked me and Anna out of the hospital and took us back to the island. At first I thought I was finally getting to spend all my time with Anna. But I was wrong. Richard locked me up in the barn. With horses! Those hideous creatures!

There was an upper floor in the barn. The animals were on the bottom and my room was on the upper floor. There I had a bed, a wooden chair and a TV set. There was also a music box and some toys, all of them resembling horses. One of those toys was the rocking horse I had seen in my foresight. I hated all of those things! And I hated Richard with all my inhuman heart. He had locked me there to separate me from Anna, because my powers had been making her suffer.

I could have used telekinesis to unlock the door and run away. But I had a better idea. I wanted to punish Richard by driving all his four-legged creatures to death. After all, that was the original purpose of my existence. Torturing humans!

But my inhuman powers didn't have such a strong influence on the animals from the same beginning. I was unable to just make their hearts stop beating, like I had done to that doctor at the hospital. That was probably because I was partially human, which was why I could use my powers on humans much easier than on animals. It had been easy to fulfill a human rider with an enormous amount of dark energy and disturb a horse that way. But directly affecting an animal was much more difficult.

However, with time my grudge and endless hatred towards Richard Morgan were growing stronger. It took my rage another seven months to become strong enough to disturb the horses. I remember the day when the first horse ran wild inside the barn and broke the wooden wall with its hooves. It ran directly to the island's shore and drowned itself in the ocean. That explained the water waves appearing in my foresight under the rocking horse. My evil energy was finally strong enough to scare one of those disgusting creatures to death.

Several more horses committed suicide in the same way. But those hadn't been kept in that barn. I was focusing my energy on disturbing the other ones on the farm, because if every suicidal horse had been from the barn that I was locked in, Richard would have been sure their deaths were my fault. Otherwise he could only suspect. Unfortunately, it was taking me a lot of energy to influence one horse, so I wasn't able to drive them all to death at the same time. Since I didn't intend to take my mask of an innocent child off, I had to dissimulate the pleasure I felt by watching Richard's horses taking their own lives under my influence.

As I was able to overhear some conversations from my barn room, I realized that people thought the animals were killing themselves due to some unknown disease. Some officials and veterinarians were hired to figure the problem out. But every single test they did gave negative results. No one knew what was going on and they couldn't imagine the mysterious series of horses' suicides being caused by a little girl in the barn. For a moment I thought of attracting those humans' attention by shouting and begging for help, knowing it would cause a severe trouble to Richard. But I also knew that if I did that the case would be reported to social workers, who would take me away from the Morgans if they found out I was kept in a barn. That would mean never seeing Anna again. So I rather stayed quiet.

Richard would fix the fences whenever they would be destroyed by some suicidal livestock. Although he suspected on the horses' death being my revenge on him, he was reluctant to get me out of that awful barn. I could have killed him, just like I had killed Doctor Scott. But I didn't want it to be that easy for him. I _hated _that man. I wanted him to suffer, I wanted to make his life a misery. So, two weeks after the first horse's suicide, more than 27 were already dead.

Terrified by those events, Anna was readmitted to the Eola hospital before the end of the month. I was told about that by Richard, who determinedly blamed me for that. As people still believed that the horses were committing suicide because of some disease, the farm was quarantined for more than five weeks. But nobody was able to figure out the cause of the animals' suicides. That made me realize why I had seen dinosaur skeletons in my foresight. It was telling me that Richard's horses were going to get exterminated just like dinosaurs.

After spending a little less than one month at the psychiatric hospital Anna was checked out, and for some reason I was released from the barn. I was so happy and relieved to see my mommy again, without knowing what was really going on. Anna told me we were going for an excursion to a place called Shelter Mountain. I was fascinated by the idea, without knowing Richard's and Anna's real intentions. I just knew that the image of a leafless tree was getting more and more vivid in my head. It had been present all the time. I had once projected it onto a wall of the barn during the time I spent there. That tree was some unclear and mysterious, but very strong premonition.

Richard and Anna didn't wait. On the same day when she was released from the hospital, we went to Shelter Mountain. I remember Anna getting ready for the trip, standing in front of her oval mirror. She untied her hair as I approached her and stood by her left side. She seemed to be surprised by seeing me, but then she just started to brush her hair. She was brushing it for several minutes, just like she usually did before making it into a new bun. Then I started playing with her, using telekinesis to make the mirror slide rapidly across the wall and come right in front of me for a brief second. She smiled at me as I returned the mirror to her in the same way. Her smile was heartwarming, although it felt somehow strange at the same time. She had never smiled at me that way. I suddenly thought she was maybe nervous about something. When I asked her, though, she said it was just her usual travel fever.

However, we arrived safely to Shelter Mountain, not long before the sunset time. When we came, I decided to take a walk around that lonely and silent place. The scenery was so beautiful that even my inhuman soul was fascinated. I came across an abandoned old well, built of stones arranged in circular rows. Seven of those rows could be seen above the ground. There were probably many more underground. But it wasn't the well why I stopped there and started to stare with astonishment at what was situated a few meters ahead. There was the tree I had seen in my foresight.

It wasn't really leafless. It had red leaves that in front of the setting sun looked a lot like flames. The tree looked like burning. I was mysteriously fascinated by that plant and wondering why it had been appearing in my foresight. My mind was so occupied with it that in those few moments I didn't need Anna next to myself. She was with Richard and I was unusually uninterested in knowing what they were talking about.

I was just staring at the tree, singing a short song I had just made up in an unknown melody played by the music box I had had in the barn: _Round we go, the world is spinning. When it stops, it's just beginning. Sun comes up, we laugh and we cry. Sun goes down and then we all die. _I wasn't sure what had inspired me for that song, where had those words come to my mind from, but I was just singing them over and over, trying to remember where I had heard them before and wondering about the tree I was looking at. But in a few minutes I was interrupted by someone's steps. It was Anna.

"Isn't it beautiful here, Samara?" She asked me as I stopped singing. "So peaceful."

I didn't say a thing. I was just trying to figure out why I had seen that tree in my head so many times.

"I know things will get better." She continued.

I was still quiet. But in a few seconds my sight was suddenly blacked out. Anna put a black nylon bag over my head. I was shocked and confused by what she was doing as I started to lose my breath. My mommy was suffocating me with the bag on my head.

"All I ever wanted was you." I heard those words she said right before hitting me in the head with a hard item and pushing me down the well.

Just a few seconds later I felt the cold water touching me from everywhere. That physical shock was so strong that in the moment I didn't have time to think about the horrifying idea of my beloved mommy tossing me down the well.

The sight I saw after opening my eyes in the water looked a lot like a solar eclipse. I was surrounded by darkness, with a bright circular hole right above me. Then a dark circular object appeared and started to hide the light from me, like the Moon hides the sunlight during eclipse. When the dark object covered the hole, I saw a ring of white light in the middle of an empty black sight, identical to some rings that had appeared a few times in my foresights. I was left in almost complete darkness. The only image I could see was the ring.

It took me a few seconds to realize what had just happened. Anna had pushed the lid onto the well, probably helped by Richard in that physical work. At that moment I understood why she had been nervous before our trip. She and Richard had planned the excursion with the purpose of getting rid of me.

_My mommy, my loved one!_ I was almost sure it had been Richard who had talked her into doing that to me. But my inhuman soul was hurt by the fact that she had _accepted_to do it. To throw me down and let me die from hunger and cold, in solitude, surrounded by darkness and freezing cold water.

I soon realized that my assumption hadn't been wrong. In spite of the well being sealed, I heard the voices. Richard and Anna were still there. I heard their conversation. Anna was terrified by what she had just done, but Richard told her she had done the right thing. He said I had brought nothing but tragedies to them and to the entire island.

In that moment I started to yell and shout, begging them to let me out of there.

"She is alive!" I heard Anna's voice. "I can't do this, Richard, we have to set her free!"

"Anna, dear, no!" Richard contradicted her as I was still persistently shouting. "If we let her out after what we've done, things would only get worse. She would get back on us for trying to kill her!"

"I can't let her starve to death down there, Richard!" Anna told him off and I heard a brief rasping noise of the well's lid moving.

"Stop it, Anna!" Richard shouted at her and I figured out what was going on. Anna wanted to set me free, but she wasn't strong enough to push the lid down on her own. And Richard was reluctant to help. I was right. Getting rid of me _had _been Richard's idea.

Anna started to cry. She was desperately sobbing after what she had done to me. Richard started to comfort her, convincing her there was nothing better they could have done. But I wasn't giving up. I was still shouting at them to let me out.

"Let's go, darling!" Richard said, ignoring my voice. "There's nothing left to do here."

I could recognize those words of his in spite of my loud cry. And I didn't like the idea of them leaving at all. I knew, if they just went away I would never be with Anna again, neither in this nor in the other world. _Anna, my beloved mommy!_ Although she was the one that I was sentenced to death by, she was my mother and I still loved her. I loved her so much that I just couldn't leave this world without her. I needed her next to myself in the afterlife. Just me and her, together for the rest of eternity, without that hideous man Richard Morgan!

She was still close enough to be reached by my power of projected thermography, in spite of me being sealed in the well. My powers couldn't be blocked by a physical obstacle. So I projected thoughts into Anna's mind: _I can't take it anymore. I'm going to throw myself off the cliff to the ocean and put myself out of this misery. _

In the despair she was going through at the moment, she most likely wasn't aware of my influence. She couldn't even imagine that the idea didn't originate from her own mind. I needed her to die. To die in water, just like me, so that we could be together in the other world.

"Anna!" I suddenly heard Richard shouting after her as she started to run away from him.

I knew what was happening. She had started to run through the forest to the cliff we had seen while arriving to Shelter Mountain. She was heading there to take her own life, just as I had made her decide. Richard ran after her. But I knew he wasn't going to be able to stop her, because she was a much faster runner than him and the decision I had projected into her mind was too strong for him to talk her out of it. I predicted he was still going to be running through the forest in the moment when she reached the cliff and threw herself down. So he wasn't even going to witness the most tragic moment. He was going to live with the painful incertitude until someone found Anna's corpse in the ocean.

But I wasn't sad because of Anna's death at all. Not only was it the only way for me to be with her after I die, but I also knew that her death was the most painful punishment for Richard, once he found out about it. Due to me he lost what he loved the most. He had lost many of his horses and then he lost his wife. I could imagine that breeding horses just wouldn't be the same for him without Anna. So I left him with nothing. His doom was worse than mine, what befell him must have been worse than the same death.

However, a few minutes later I started to think of surviving. Although I didn't like the idea of living without Anna, I did have my survival instinct and I just didn't want to die there in the well. I decided to do my best to get out of that dark place.

As the well was built of irregularly shaped rocks, I came up with the idea of climbing. As I realized I had lost my shoes in the water, I also took my socks off and started to climb. I thought I could come close to the lid and use telekinesis to push it off. But much before coming to the top, my fingers couldn't hold on to the rocks anymore and I fell down. I tried a few more times, but it was impossible. My body wasn't strong enough to climb up there.

I started shouting for help again, but it was useless. Shelter Mountain was a lonely place, no one could hear me. After all, Richard and Anna had surely chosen carefully such a place to get rid of me. There was nothing left for me to do. I was destined to die.

When that fact found its way to my mind, I was suddenly overwhelmed with helpless despair. I impulsively started to scratch the inner wall of the well, so forcefully and violently that my nails were torn off and left in the notches among the rocks. I could feel the hot blood leaking from the holes left in the place of my nails, although I still wasn't feeling any physical pain.

Not much later I started to think of what I was surrounded by. _Water… Deep, dark water… _That liquid was going to take my life away after all. I remembered my biological mother Evelyn. I remembered how she wanted to drown me in water. I remembered how in that moment I had heard the song I had been singing before getting thrown down the well. It finally made sense. When I had heard it as a baby, it was a foresight, telling me I was going to be singing that song just before getting thrown into water and left to die. With time I had forgotten about it, and then, while standing next to the well I spontaneously made up those words. _...Sun goes down and then we all die. _I realized the words had come to me as another foresight of my upcoming death.

I also remembered that powerful invisible demon that had possessed me and won over the goodness that had died in my soul so long ago. That demon surely knew what it was doing. It must have had plans for me. So I started to pray. That was the first and only time in my entire life that I prayed. Being sentenced to death, I prayed to that mysterious inhuman force, begging it for help.

Seven days passed since the moment Anna threw me down the well. _Seven! _That number seemed to have some unknown meaning in my life. I recalled being _seven _years old when I was sent to the psychiatric hospital, spending _seven_ months there and _seven_ months locked in the barn before driving the first horse to death. The well had _seven_ overhead rows of rocks and I lived for _seven_ days in its deep darkness, accompanied only by the big ring above me, whose light was helping me differ days from nights. I also recalled I had projected an image of exactly seven jacks on one of those pieces of X-ray film at the psychiatric hospital. At that moment I hadn't even thought of that number as a foresight. But it had probably been one, just like the images of Anna and the hairdressing tools she had been using before we left to Shelter Mountain.

That was the first time I wished I could sleep like a human. If I had been able to fall asleep, I would have drowned days ago and be put out of my misery. But as I was unable to sleep, I resisted so long. For _seven days_. The moment of death was finally coming.

On the verge of death I started to think my last thoughts, mostly recalling some moments from my life and having some apparently random visions, which were probably foresights in fact. I was looking at the ring of light, the last picture my eyes were going to see before I die. The thought of dying reminded me of the static screen which I was often seeing on the TV set in the barn.

Then I had a vision of blood in some dark, wavy water. I recalled the wooden chair I had had in the barn. I also remembered Anna's long black hair and her comb whose needles reminded me of claws. I remembered her looking at her reflection in the oval mirror, brushing her hair before our trip to Shelter Mountain. I also remembered my own reflection I had seen in that mirror after telekinetically bringing it to myself. It had been the last time I saw my own face, which I imagined fading away in dark fog, just like my life was fading away in those moments, in deep darkness.

I also recalled returning that mirror to Anna and seeing her nervous smile. As she was on my mind, I recalled the song I had been singing before being approached by her and thrown down the well. Then I imagined a droplet of blood sliding down a spike, just like the blood that had been leaking from my fingers after I had lost my nails on the sharp rocks of the well. I remembered Richard looking at me with hatred from the window of our house on the island.

I visualized the nearby cliff, along with one of the many flies that were annoying me at the hospital. I didn't know why a fly came to my mind in that moment, but I remembered being treated like a monster at that hospital and feeling like vomiting when those doctors managed to make me feeble with their medications. If they had just known what kind of monster I _really _was!

I also remembered the dark sight of nylon bag over my head and the lid being pushed over the well. I recalled the tree I was looking at and the setting sun making its red leaves look like flames. At least I came to understand why it had been appearing in my foresights. It was the last thing I had seen before getting thrown down the well.

I also thought of my lost nails again and imagined a finger being impaled by a spike and getting its nail torn off. Then I had a vision of maggots. Tons of maggots devouring some decaying cadavers. Must have been the dead bodies of Richard's horses. Then I imagined those maggots transforming into dozens of just as insignificant creatures. _Humans!_ I imagined dozens of humans dying. Drowning in water to death, just like me. That's what I would like to befall all of mankind. I wanted everyone to suffer just like me!

Then I remembered the table in our house on the island and imagined a giant centipede crawling away from underneath, although the centipedes I had seen weren't _that _big. Then I imagined an injured lamb limping into the barn, remembering how Richard had left me there like a useless animal. I also had a vision of a horse eye. Those hideous creatures seemed to have become my bitter obsession. For one more time I remembered the lid being pushed over the well and my fingers that couldn't climb me up. They were just as useless as they would have been in a wooden box, off my hands. I imagined exactly seven of them as I had been down there for seven days.

One more time I recalled the apparently burning tree and the nylon bag over my head. Then I thought of Anna untying her hair in front of the mirror. I remembered our house again, as I had seen it while getting forcefully dragged to the barn by Richard. I thought of the wooden chair again, imagining it upside down and spinning around, just like my consciousness that was at the moment getting lost in death.

Then I remembered the ladder in the barn, imagining it placed against a wall and thinking how it would have been helpful for climbing up the inner wall of the well. Then I imagined dead horses lying on the shore of Moesko Island, not very far away from the island's lighthouse. Their death had been one of my biggest victories. The thought of victory reminded me of singing a song, so I recalled my singing voice again. Then I imagined Anna throwing herself off the nearby cliff, just as I had made her decide. I had needed her to do that, I just couldn't imagine my afterlife without her.

It was coming. I visualized the ladder dropping down as I felt my life fading away. I remembered the lid again by seeing the ring of white light, which was the last thing for me to see before the moment of death. I closed my eyes for the last time. Forever. The ladder in my mind dropped down. Dead like me, in the well. _The well…_ It was the last thing I imagined before my mind went static, just like the screen of the TV set in the barn.

The cold water finally consumed the last molecules of my body's strength. I died.


	6. Chapter 4

_Samara died stuck in the well at the age of eight. But such a mundane thing as death is too weak to destroy a powerful demon like her. What did she experience in the first 24 years of her afterlife? How was the deadly videotape created? How does she emerge from a TV? If those are your question, this chapter is the answer you're looking for!_

* * *

**The memories: Terror's Realm**

Just as mankind theorized, death was not the end. But afterlife was nothing like what I had imagined. It was not an alternate dimension where I could spend the entire eternity next to my mommy. No, I was still inside the well, floating above an eight years old girl's lifeless body getting lost in dark water. The body that used to be mine. It looked so sad, so innocent. Unlike the demon that was released out of it, the demon that was me. I looked at my ghostly limbs. My skin was wrinkled and dead gray, covered in dirt. I was still wearing the same white dress I had had on at the moment of being thrown down the well by Anna. My dead body was dressed in an identical garment, with the only difference that it was smaller and clean white, unlike mine which was torn and covered in dirt just like my skin. It was very clear to me what I had just become. I was a demonic ghost that had left a female eight years old human body. My appearance was most likely not caused by my death. It was just a visualization of what I was, of what I had almost always been. An inhuman monster.

Being an immaterial ghost, I just flew up and passed through the hard matter of the well. I found myself outside, seeing the full daylight again. The scenery hadn't changed at all. It was just the same as it had been when Anna had thrown me down the well. The only difference was a few humans passing by, which hadn't been there a week ago. I saw and felt one man passing right through me. It made me realize that no one could see me. Of course, I was just a ghost.

I flew back to Moesko Island, to see my house. Richard was there, already knowing that Anna was dead. He still had his horses, but I saw the bitter despair he had on his face while feeding them. All the joy he used to have around them was gone for good. As I had predicted, he was just unable to enjoy it without Anna. I assumed he was already trying to sell the last ones he still had. I was so viciously glad to see him deprived of all the joy of life. He had lost what he had cherished the most in his life. He was suffering, he was in agony.

I tried to use my power of projected thermography, to project some gruesome images in his mind and give him a good scare. I wanted to give him a hallucination of myself strangling him to death, to let him know that I wasn't gone. But my powers didn't work anymore. It seemed like I had lost them.

For the moment I thought it was my worst doom, the worst disaster that could have happened to me – being deprived of my supernatural powers! Being a useless ghost, sentenced to spend the rest of eternity without being able to influence anyone, without being able to fulfill my destiny, the purpose of my existence, without being able to do what I had been born for. _Torturing humans!_

However, as there was nothing I could do on the island, I left it and went back to Shelter Mountain, to the well that I had died in. As soon as I came there, I had a premonition. Something was telling me that it was not really the end, that there was still something magnificent waiting for me to do. That premonition was a light of dark hope for me. Maybe I did still have my powers after all. Maybe I just needed time to develop them again after my death.

It didn't take me a long time to figure the truth out. That same day an elder man passed by the well and I tried to give him a hallucination. I was surprised to see my success when I saw him with an expression of fright on his face, walking away from the place as fast as his old legs were allowing him to. I had made him hear my demonic voice coming out of nowhere and constantly repeating the word _death_.

I figured it out. For some reason, my powers only worked around the well. Around my dead body, around the place where I had died. But in spite of realizing that, I decided not to do anything similar in a long time. For the moment I didn't want any human attention to be attracted to that abandoned old well. I decided to wait for an opportunity to come back. And if I wanted to succeed, at first I needed to be forgotten, just like that well. I didn't want anyone to find my body there. If I had been found so soon, my every chance to influence this disgusting world would have been gone. So I just had to wait and hope that nobody would unseal the well. I did have a premonition something was going to happen. I knew I couldn't just fade away like that, without being able to influence anyone ever again.

Since the day of my death, nothing happened for 23 years. I was mostly just dwelling around the place, observing the useless human passengers unaware of my presence and sometimes going away from Shelter Mountain to watch some random humans in their everyday life. But then suddenly, my premonition started to come true. The territory around the well was bought by a wealthy company who built a camping resort there. They called it Shelter Mountain Inn. Just as I wanted, no one paid much attention to the well. They concreted the grass surface around it and built a log cabin above it. There were several cabins around and the one above the well was called cabin 12.

But what really attracted my attention was when they installed a TV set and a video deck in cabin 12. I had some premonition about those devices. At first I thought it was just because I had never seen a video deck while living in a human body. It hadn't been invented before my death. But my hunch happened to be about something much, much greater than a piece of technology.

The business of the camping resort was progressing very well, but I had to wait for one whole year for any customer to finally take the cabin 12. Those were some four teenagers, two romantic couples. It was easy to memorize their names: Scott and Stacy, Josh and Katie. They intended to spend a weekend over there. I was observing them carefully since the moment of their arrival.

They seemed to be a typical gang of rebellious teenagers, especially the boys. They were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and marijuana. Scott thought he was cool because he was walking around shirtless most of the time. The girls were apparently more decent, they weren't drinking as much as the boys did, and they enjoyed exploring the nature around the resort. But they were eating a lot, probably much more than usually, and they were also having sex with their partners; Katie with Josh, Stacy with Scott. They were talking about it quite openly among themselves, but Katie's romance with Josh was apparently a secret that not many people were allowed to know. Probably because Katie had the reputation of a quite decent girl, unlike Josh.

They were even having some childish fun, like writing on each other's faces with markers. And they were taking lots of photos of themselves. However, nothing special was going on until Scott and Stacy turned the TV on for the first time. My premonition was growing stronger. It culminated at the moment when they also turned the video deck on. I could almost feel my immaterial demonic heart beating in vile excitement when they put a blank, unlabelled videotape in. _The videotape!_ That was the core of my premonition. Scott started to record a football game from a TV channel.

As soon as the device started to record TV content on that tape, my time began. I suddenly felt my power of projected thermography growing stronger, I felt the chance of projecting my last living thoughts onto the videotape. It was something much greater than burning images onto physical surfaces, or making pictures on X-ray film. The energy of my last living thoughts was still accumulated in the abandoned sealed well and I could use my powers to raise that energy up and project those thoughts in form of moving images onto the tape.

But somehow I knew it was going to be much more than that. There was an unknown something about that video technology. It was sensitive to paranormal activity. Whatever had been the cause of that, the inventor had surely done it unknowingly. So I focused my mind on the tape in the video deck and on my energy accumulated in the well to put them together. My last living thoughts were still so vivid in my mind, even 24 years later. As I focused myself on merging that energy with the videotape, the energy invisibly rose up from the well and got fused with the tape, thus recording my thoughts on it, beginning with the ring of white light and ending with the image of the well turning to the static screen. The recording lasted for a little less than one and a half minute.

"Seven days." I said in my demonic voice after the recording was done, remembering the last days of my life spent in the well. I knew that none of those teenagers could hear me speaking. They didn't even know I was there. But after I finished the recording, I just didn't want to let some mundane TV content follow my work. Everything that got recorded on the tape after my mental images was static screen.

But what I projected on that tape was much more than just plain mental images. I felt how strong my power had become. It was much stronger than while I had been living inside a young human body. By fusing my accumulated energy with the tape, I projected onto it something more than my thoughts. I projected my rage, my grudge, my destiny. I had the feeling that the tape was going to make my inhuman powers mobile, that I was going to be able to have my influence on everyone who watched it, even if they didn't stay close to the cabin 12. And I knew that all of them were going to share my destiny. As soon as they watched my tape, their life would fall down the well. Seven days later it would fade away. They would die, just like me. After seven days of agony.

Though, before those four started to watch the tape, I used what was left of my energy in the well to modify that curse I had recorded on it. I decided to create a way for a victim to survive. It didn't take me long to make one up. Within those seven days, the victim had to make a copy of the tape and have someone else watch it. I chose that to be the only way to survive. To spread my influence by copying the tape and putting the curse on someone else. So I decided. As I knew I was going to be able to influence the minds of the four teenagers after they watched it, I thought I would maybe let them know how to survive. Or maybe I would just let them die. I wasn't sure yet.

It was nearly 10:00 PM when Scott and Stacy wanted to watch their recorded football game. They convinced Katie and Josh to watch it with them. That was good for me. It meant my influence was going to be spread wider. When they finally played the tape, the VCR's display was showing some unreadable numbers. The digits looked like broken and it was because of the paranormal origin of the tape's content. Video technology really _was _sensitive to paranormal activity!

While watching the tape, those four were completely confused by the moving images that made no sense to them, that were for an unknown reason there instead of the football game. I was a little surprised when I heard in the video some noises that had no clear meaning for me, but soon I realized they had most likely come from my subconsciousness in my last living moments and appeared in the video together with the images of my thoughts.

However, everything that could be seen and heard in the video was at first perceived by those four teenagers just as some strange images and noises. But for me it was different. I could sense something deeper behind the screen, like a whole new world on the other side of that technological device. As none of those four knew I was there, I approached the screen and raised my hand. As I was a ghost, my hand just passed through the screen and I could feel the touch of the electronics. But although nothing special seemed to be happening, I trusted my demonic sixth sense. I could feel something changing drastically, like a formation of a new reality. And it was there, behind the screen, growing wider and stronger as my last living thoughts were playing on the screen for the first time.

My premonition resulted in being true at the moment when the last graphic image appeared on the screen. The well, my last living thought before the static screen. I had died after recalling its outer appearance. As soon as that image appeared, I was sucked in through the screen and I suddenly found myself standing right in front of the well. But it was different from its current real self. Not only was I, just like at the moment before being thrown down by Anna, surrounded by grass that wasn't there anymore. The entire scenery around me was monochromatic, as if I had become color blind. And it was unusually cold. It didn't affect my demonic ghostly existence, though. But the biggest difference was the fact that my body had become material. It looked just as I had seen myself as a ghost – dead skin covered in dirt, ruined dress and wet dark hair. But as long as I was there, I wasn't able just to pass through solid matter. I was a living creature there. An inhuman one, though.

I found out how strong had become my power of projected thermography. So powerful that by projecting my thoughts onto that videotape, I created an alternate universe consisting of those thoughts. The technology made it possible. I'll probably never know how. Nobody does.

But even though I wasn't in cabin 12 anymore, I still knew what was going on there. I could see it very vividly in my head. A few seconds after the appearance of the screen following the image of the well, the phone in the room rang. Scott picked it up. I could hear the voice on the other side. My own voice.

"Seven days." It said.

I remembered pronouncing those two words right after projecting my thoughts onto the tape. Obviously, it was also somehow projected onto it, but not visually. I think it was like a signal that alarmed the closest telephone device and made its sound speaker play my words. It seemed like _all_ technology was sensitive to the ghostly activity, as my activity from the videotape influenced the phone. That explained the phone receiver appearing several times in my foresights.

I was still in that virtual realm I had been sucked into, but I could still see everything going on among the four teenagers. It was as if I was at both places at the same time. As soon as Scott picked the phone up and heard my voice, he took my words as a death threat. All the images from the tape, in combination with my voice, had surely made him think of death. It was expectable, since I had been dying while visualizing the images that I later projected onto the tape. He discussed it with the others, telling them that all of them had seven days left to live. But after less than an hour of discussion, they stopped taking me seriously. They thought that the video and the phone call were a prank or something.

Scott and Stacy thought of their football game again. They were angry and disappointed for a while because they couldn't watch it. They complained a lot to the innkeeper, especially because of the TV reception which was really bad in that area.

As they had ended up disappointed by the place, they didn't spend the entire weekend there as they had originally planned. After only one night they just fled without paying. But right before they left, they took one last photo of themselves in front of cabin 12. As the photos hadn't been processed yet, they had no idea what was going to be shown on that last photo. But I did know. Their faces on it were going to be blurred. It was going to be a visual manifestation of the curse that my video had placed on them. They were living their probably last seven days.

I was especially surprised by what happened when the four separated after leaving Shelter Mountain. I stopped being at only two places at the same time. I was at six places instead. I was in my virtual monochromatic realm next to the well. I was also in Shelter Mountain Inn, next to my videotape left by those four. And I was around every single one of them.

At first it was quite confusing to be at so many places at the same time. But it didn't take me long to realize it was nothing impossible for a demonic ghost like myself. At that moment I recalled the day when I had been thrown down the well by Anna and when I had projected suicidal thoughts into her mind. That was the moment when I understood why I hadn't used projected thermography for forcing her to set me free instead. I must have had a subconscious foresight telling me that death was going to make me more powerful. If I hadn't died, I wouldn't have been able to have my influence in multiple places. Maybe I had even been torturing Anna with the subconscious purpose of making her kill me and thus increase my power.

I even thought that the demon that had possessed my body had exactly predicted what was going to happen. It had maybe possessed me on purpose, given me extraordinary inhuman powers and evil personality, knowing that I was going to die and use the last energy released from my living body to create something that was going to spread the influence of its dark power.

Though, my power wasn't equally strong everywhere. In my realm I was apparently able to do anything I wanted, it was a world built of my own thoughts. In Shelter Mountain Inn I wasn't able to do much. I could eventually attract someone's attention to watch my tape. But at that moment I wasn't interested in that. I was more interested in my first four victims. I was able to influence their minds, to give them visions, hallucinations and nightmares by using projected thermography.

When the four came back to their schools, Josh, Scott and Stacy spread the rumor about my videotape. They were all in the same school, only Katie was in another one. Due to those three, the videotape that kills the viewer seven days after being watched became a high school legend. They didn't say everything accurately, though. According to their words, I had said on the phone:"You will die in seven days!" which wasn't completely accurate.

Anyway, during their last seven days I was forcing them to think, among other things, of flies, oval mirrors, the chair I had been sitting on while being asked questions by Doctor Scott, his camera recording me, horses committing suicide, ladders, rings of white light... I was also making them think of my long dark hair, which they were drawing on all the human faces in magazines and other papers in their surroundings.

I was also able to move the objects in their sight, even if they weren't in the center of their attention. I could have even influenced the minds of other humans around them. But I wasn't able to just kill humans that hadn't watched my video like I had done with Doctor Scott. It seemingly required living in a physical body. However, I didn't want to influence anyone around my first victims. I didn't want to prepare them for the upcoming tragedy. I wanted it to be a shock for all of them.

As I despised mankind, I realized it would be possible to force those four to take any sharp tool and slaughter everyone in their surroundings. But it wouldn't be pleasant enough to watch them doing that. It was much more enjoyable to watch them _suffer_. I was determined not to give them any hint how to survive my curse. They were just too useless. And besides that, I had a premonition that their death was going to bring something new to my lifeless existence.

However, I was somehow intrigued by that girl called Katie. She really was the most decent one of the four. She was spending a lot of time with her cousin, a boy named Aidan. He was nine, just a year older than me at the time of my death. There was something special about that boy, his presence was increasing my strong premonition that a big change was coming. As Katie, just like the three of her friends, felt my influence after having watched the tape, she was already afraid of dying. She didn't tell anyone about it, thinking that nobody would believe her. But she did give a hint to Aidan. She told him how they didn't have enough time. In a moment when she went to the bathroom, the confused Aidan browsed one of her notebooks, where she had been writing and drawing her random thoughts among her school notes. There he read that she was going to die. But he didn't ask her anything about it. He probably thought it was impossible since she was completely healthy and had no dangerous enemies.

So, I was observing those four during their last days and using my influence on them, thinking about what exactly I should do to them in their deadline moment. I knew it wasn't really necessary to do anything. They would die from my curse anyway, when the portal between their reality and my virtual realm is opened seven days after them watching my video. But I wanted to make that moment special. As I had realized that my video was like a key to the portal to my world, I decided to emerge from the closest TV set and appear in front of them in the deadline moment, showing them my demonic, apparently material form. I knew that my appearance of a walking corpse would scare them all to death, especially after they see me coming out of a TV set, without knowing that what I came out of is not just a box of electronics, but a virtual realm built of my thoughts.

_My realm... _The visual part of it consisted of a monochromatic version of Shelter Mountain's scenery, as it looked on the day I had been thrown down the well by Anna. So it contained the well, the grass around it, the apparently burning tree, a birch forest and the cliff next to the ocean. The only difference was the season. In my realm it was winter all the time. It was as cold as my soul. I realized the entire place was made of pure terror. That well was where I had been through the worst terror of my life. It was also the place that was going to bring the culmination of terror to my victims, right before their horrifying death. So I gave a name to that place built of my dark thoughts – _Terror's Realm_.

Near 10:00 PM on my victims' seventh day, I was focused on three places where I had influence. One was at Katie's house. Her parents were away, she was spending the evening with a friend named Becca. The other one was Josh's apartment. He was sitting in his living room next to the balcony and playing a computer game. The third one was Scott's car. He was driving and Stacy was sitting next to him.

I made four TV sets turn themselves on at the same time. Two at Katie's house, one in Josh's living room and the closest one to Scott's car, situated in a house he was driving by. At first all the four TV screens were static. There was currently nobody at the house close to Scott's car, so nobody noticed the TV turning itself on and showing the static screen.

Scott was waiting on the crossroad for the green light. Josh grabbed a remote controller and turned his TV off, but it automatically turned itself on just a second later. Then he just muted it and went back to his computer, without paying much attention. Katie was in the kitchen when her TV sets turned themselves on. She saw only the one in the living room, right next to the kitchen. The other one was in her own room. Becca was there.

Katie was terrified by the TV turning itself on and going static, assuming it had something to do with my video. She turned it off, but just like in Josh's case, it turned itself on again. Then she plugged it out. But at that moment I made the fridge in the kitchen open itself. That girl was the most afraid one and I really enjoyed torturing her in the last seconds of her life. As she closed the fridge, I started to project a strong feeling of fear into her mind. She ran away from the kitchen and headed slowly to her room.

Suddenly, the monochromatic image of the well appeared on three TV screens. The portal between reality and Terror's Realm was opened to bring the doom to my teenage victims. For a moment I thought of the scariest possible way to manifest myself in front of them. I especially wondered about Becca's reaction. I knew I couldn't kill her because my curse hadn't been placed on her, but I knew she was going to see me. It didn't take me long to make the eeriest idea up.

I showed myself on three screens climbing out of the well in my demonic form. I started to limp like a walking corpse over the grass of Terror's Realm and to get closer to the screen. A few seconds later, I emerged from all three screens at the same time, showing myself in an apparently material form and leaving wet tracks of my limbs and hair on the floor.

Becca was the first one to see me. Her face revealed that my appearance overwhelmed her with enormous fear which was feeding my demonic soul. She felt like screaming, but I didn't want Katie to know that her friend had a terrifying experience. I didn't want to prepare her for anything. So as I appeared in front of Becca, I used projected thermography to force her to keep quiet and to fulfill her mind with terror and an enormous amount of my dark, fiendish energy. She ran to the corner of the room and dropped down in fear, gasping quietly as I was forcefully preventing her from screaming. I noticed the possibility of bringing some water from Terror's Realm into the humans' reality while the portal was opened. So I teleported some water from the well to the corridor outside the room.

It was exactly 10:00 PM when I appeared in front of my victims. After I emerged from the TV screen in the empty house, having it left flooded to puzzle its owners, I teleported myself into Scott's car. As soon as he and Stacy saw me, they screamed in terror as I rapidly projected some of my last living thoughts into their minds. I wanted them to die with those thoughts just like me, although I made them see all those images in only one single second. But there was one major difference between my video and what I made them see on the verge of death. The last picture they saw was not the well, but the ring of white light. I wanted it to be the last one, because it had been the last image seen by my living eyes. I didn't do that only to Scott and Stacy, I decided to do the same to all my current and future victims. _Before you die, you see the ring._ I made it a rule.

After that appearance of mine, Scott's car veered off and crashed into a tree. Josh was overwhelmed with terror when he saw me emerging from the screen and water coming apparently out of nowhere and flooding the room. Frightened to death by the thoughts I projected into his mind, he ran backwards to the balcony and fell over its fence down from the seventh floor. Katie's attention was attracted by the water in the corridor next to the door of her room, so she entered the room exactly at time and yelled in fear after seeing a manifestation of me right in front of her and experiencing the projection of my thoughts. She started to run away in fear and hid in her closet. I didn't need to go after her.

It was just a question of seconds when the four were going to die after seeing my apparition. Their facial skin was distorted and partially melted away in the moment of seeing my face and receiving my thoughts. Scott and Stacy didn't die from consequences of the car crash. Josh didn't die from his head injuries after falling down his balcony. All the four of them died of myocardial infarctions, caused by the enormous fear they felt after seeing my appearance and my thoughts. Just like the other three, Katie died just a few seconds after hiding in her closet. The only one that survived was Becca, because she hadn't been cursed by my video. But she was never going to be the same person again. The amount of dark energy I managed to project into her head was big enough for me to have an influence over her. I was able to make her commit suicide. But I didn't want to, it was more enjoyable to watch her full of fear and of my darkness that replaced her sanity.

I was surprised to realize that I still had my influence around the corpses of my victims. I still had the ability of influencing the minds of humans who were around. But I didn't use it much. I just thought it was too early to let the world know that a paranormal force was behind the inexplicable death of those four teenagers. I enjoyed it being as mysterious as the cause of Becca's insane behavior. She was sent to a mental hospital. She became very quiet, almost catatonic. She would just freak out whenever she would see a TV set or a video deck. Because of the dark energy I had left in her, her black hair started to grow faster and to look more and more like mine.

As I wanted to keep myself mysterious, I abandoned the corpses of Scott, Stacy and Josh. But there was something at Katie's wake that was giving me a strong premonition. Aidan was there. He was such a strange and mysterious boy. He was truly devastated by his cousin's death, but he didn't drop a single tear. His face was almost expressionless.

But it wasn't really him who got me intrigued there. While dwelling around Katie's coffin, which was closed because her parents didn't want the guests to see her distorted face, my attention was attracted to Aidan's mother. Her name was Rachel. She was the one giving me that enormously strong premonition. I intuitively knew it was somehow connected with the feeling I had had while observing Aidan around my victim. But that feeling I had by seeing Rachel was much, much stronger. I felt it culminating after Aidan laid a flower next to Katie's photo. Rachel came by his side. She kissed his forehead, showing her compassion for the pain he felt because of losing his cousin, and cuddled his nape. What a mother she must have been! Just by seeing her approaching the boy, I knew she would never allow her husband to lock her child up with animals or to throw him in a dark abyss and leave him to die. From that moment I wanted Rachel for myself. I wanted her to be my mother.


	7. Chapter 5

_Even demonic ghosts have their soft spot, or so it seems. In Samara's case, that's her desperate yearning for a mother. How is she going to manifest herself to Rachel and what is she going to do to earn her motherly feelings? This chapter is here to answer that question._

* * *

**The memories: Yearning for a mother**

I started to observe Rachel at the wake. I found out that she was a writer with the Seattle P.I. During that evening she got talked by her sister Ruth into investigating Katie's death. So she immediately started asking around and she overheard Katie's classmates mentioning my tape. She also heard that three other teenagers had died at the same moment. Logically, that fact made the mystery more intriguing to her.

But I wasn't observing only her. I was also observing Aidan. He was just standing close to the coffin and his face was still almost expressionless. While watching him I decided to project some images into his mind. I made him see Katie's legs walking upstairs to her room. I did that to lure him up there. He did as I wanted and entered Katie's room. I knew that in that moment he felt my dark energy that had been left in that room. Of course, that was the room where the portal to Terror's Realm had opened, that evening when Becca had lost her mind and Katie had left this world.

Just a few seconds later, Rachel came up for him. Just as I thought, she was a mother that truly cared about her child. I had lured Aidan there on purpose, assuming that Rachel would come after him. I wanted to get her there because I knew she had heard about my tape. I wanted her to find it. I wanted to have my influence on her, I wanted her to truly feel my presence. And for that I needed her to watch my tape. Just as I had predicted, after Aidan got out of there, she started to look through Katie's possessions and found a piece of paper saying about photo processing.

I predicted what was going to happen. Rachel was going to see the photos taken by my four victims in Shelter Mountain Inn. She was going to read the name of that resort in some of those photos and visit that place to proceed with her investigation. And she was going to find my tape there. So I decided to give up my influence around Katie's corpse. I also abandoned the mental hospital where Becca was institutionalized. But I didn't leave her without any memory of me. She was left with my dark energy that was going to keep her deranged for the rest of her life. So I stayed only in two places. In Terror's Realm and in Shelter Mountain Inn where my tape had been left, waiting for my new mother to find it. So I focused all my activity on that place. Shelter Mountain Inn.

I didn't have to wait too long for my prediction to come true. It was Wednesday dusk when Rachel arrived there. She found the innkeeper in his cabin. His desk was on the opposite side of the shelf with videotapes. Mine was there too. I managed to attract Rachel's attention for a moment, but the innkeeper was distracting her. I didn't want to fight him for her attention, because that could scare her off, which would be counterproductive for me. She showed him a photo of my victims and found out they had stayed in cabin 12. The innkeeper started to ramble about them leaving without paying, which was my opportunity to attract Rachel's attention to my tape again. She immediately realized which one it was. It was the only one with no box or label. As she wanted to investigate, she rented cabin 12 for a night. When the innkeeper left his desk for a brief moment, she took my tape and hid it in her bag.

Just a few minutes later, she entered cabin 12. The same place where I had condemned my first victims to death. I noticed the way she was observing my tape. She was partially afraid, but she most likely knew that her investigation would come to a dead end if she didn't watch it. So she swallowed her fear and put the tape in the video deck. In the next one and a half minute she saw the visual projection of my last living thoughts. As soon as it was over, the phone rang. Just like it had happened something more than a week ago, as she picked the phone up she heard two words pronounced by my demonic voice and she felt threatened with death.

But what I felt at that moment was something I had never felt before. I had seven days of influence over the mind of a mother who truly loved her child. I had a chance to become the center of her attention for one week. For a moment I recalled Evelyn. I wondered, would she have been as sweet and loving mother as Rachel if our relationship hadn't had such a tragic ending?

There were two things I knew for sure. The first one was that I wasn't going to let Rachel die from my curse. I was going to let her know what she had to do to survive. The second one was that the one who had a deadline in seven days wasn't her. It was me. I had seven days to find a way to stay next to her forever. I knew, if I didn't do anything, in seven days I would lose my influence over her. I would still be able to dwell around her, but she would be unaware of my presence and I wouldn't be able to manifest myself to her. I couldn't let that happen. I had to find a way to keep her forever, whatever it took. I wanted her to be my mother. Not Aidan's, _mine_!

After my phone call, believing that her life was in a severe danger, the terrified Rachel took my tape out of the video deck and ran out of cabin 12. Without saying anything to the innkeeper, she sat in her car and drove back home, having left Shelter Mountain Inn. She stole my tape.

When she came home Aidan was already asleep. She quietly entered his room and smiled softly as she saw him. By every second I admired her more and more. Not even a death threat could decrease her motherly love. Even in such an eerie situation she didn't forget to love her child. She easily walked closer to him and gently kissed his forehead, without waking him up.

As she did that, she left his room and made a phone call. She called a man named Noah and told him she had to see him urgently. He accepted to visit her next day in the morning. During that night I didn't use projected thermography on Rachel at all. I was just wondering what exactly I should do to achieve my goal.

Next day was Thursday – day 1. Just a few seconds after Aidan left to school, an adult man arrived. That one was Noah. At first I didn't know who he was and where Rachel knew him from. Soon after his arrival, she handed him her camera and asked him to take some photos of her. I knew what she was doing. She wanted to see if her face was going to be blurred like the faces of my first four victims. Noah did as she wanted and her assumption happened to be right. Her face _was_ blurred. Convinced that she was going to die unless she found a way to lift the curse, she told Noah everything she knew about the situation.

The fearless Noah was reluctant to believe that a simple videotape could cause someone's death, so he requested her to show it to him. Rachel was hesitant, but he insisted and so she let him watch it. By doing that, she unknowingly did one of the two things necessary to survive – having someone else watch my video. As soon as Noah finished watching the video, the phone rang. But Rachel prevented him from picking it up. The sound of my voice mentioning seven days was saved as a voice message.

But even though Noah didn't pick up the phone, I got the ability of influencing his mind too. My curse was placed on him as well. Although he was still unconvinced, he accepted to help her investigate about the tape, to find out who had made it and where had it come from. He requested her to make him a copy so that he could study it out. I knew, as soon as she made a copy, her life wouldn't be in danger anymore.

As Noah left, Rachel went to the Seattle P.I. building and did what he had asked her. She made a copy of the tape. By doing that she saved her own life. Fortunately, I didn't lose my influence over her yet. I still had something more than six days to use my powers on her and try to find a way to keep her for myself. I also had the possibility of influencing Noah's mind, of torturing him with projected thermography just like I had tortured my first victims. But at first I wasn't extremely interested in that. My priority was Rachel.

On Friday, day 2, Rachel visited Noah in his apartment and they started to study my video together. By pausing and analyzing every single image in it, Noah realized that it hadn't been recorded with a camera. I noticed him talking like an expert about recording videos. Though, neither he nor Rachel could imagine projected thermography being behind it.

However, their investigation didn't come too far in that occasion, because they were interrupted by the arrival of Noah's assistant. The way those two talked to each other made me realize that Noah was a photojournalist by profession. After a brief conversation, the silly man wanted to show her my video. But Rachel didn't want my curse to be put on another person, so she grabbed the copied tape she had brought to Noah and ran out with it. He came after her and mocked her for running away with the tape. They had an argument which sounded like they used to be very close to each other. Intimate, I would say. But they didn't discuss for too long. Rachel left the building.

As soon as she got out, she saw a ladder placed against the wall. The ladder was the first hallucination I had projected into the minds of my first victims. In Rachel's case, it wasn't necessary because the ladder she saw was coincidentally a real one. But I knew it made her think of the one from my video. Without knowing exactly what my first victims had experienced, she most likely came to think that the images from the tape were clues leading her somewhere. It was good for me to let her keep thinking so.

On Saturday, day 3, she proceeded with her investigation by visiting Becca, Katie's friend, at the mental hospital. I had no idea what use I could have for her doing that, but as I still didn't know what would be the best for me to do, I didn't try to change her mind about it. I saw Becca again after several days. Her state of mind was nothing better than it had been when I had left her. She was almost catatonically quiet, ready to answer only a few of the many questions she was asked. Her answers were very short. She acted a lot like me while being examined by Doctor Scott. Besides that, her dark hair grew longer and denser and there were bags under her exhausted eyes. She was becoming more and more similar to me. She looked down when Rachel asked her about the videotape and she gave no answer. Rachel kept asking her how Katie had died, taking her hand on the table. Becca felt the compatibility of my dark energy in her with the one surrounding Rachel because of my presence. She could feel that I had four days left to influence Rachel. So she told her the way Katie had died was going to be shown to her in four days. She didn't know that Rachel had already been saved.

As she realized that visiting Becca was useless, Rachel left to the Seattle P.I. building where she proceeded with analyzing the images on the tape. During that work, at one moment she paused the video on the sequence of dead horses on the shore and noticed the lighthouse of Moesko Island in the background. It attracted her attention and she printed the image on a piece of paper. But the next image she paused the video on was the one of the cliff with a fly flying across the screen. Even I was surprised when I saw what happened. Although the video was paused, the fly's legs and wings on the screen kept quivering. I saw the astonishment on Rachel's face looking at the most surreal manifestation she had ever seen. She brought her fingers close to the fly and touched the screen in that area. She was shocked after moving her fingers away and realizing that she had pulled a living insect out of the screen.

In that moment her nose started to bleed. She let the insect fly away, having no idea what had just happened. I figured it out, but decided not to let her know. The image she had paused the video on belonged to the visual part of Terror's Realm, just like the well. So as she paused the video on that image, a small portal to Terror's Realm was opened and she was able to pull the insect out of there. Her nose bleeding was a reaction on her first contact with my dark virtual world.

Next day was Sunday, the day 4. By that time I had figured out Rachel's point of view. She really thought that all the images on the tape were clues, purposefully created to make one investigate. So I started to think of what could the investigation really bring her to, what was the biggest truth she could discover. The answer was: she could find out that the images were my moribund thoughts and that I died in the well. _The well! My body! _I realized that with my help she could find my body in the well. Years ago I hadn't wanted it to be found, but maybe that was what I needed to keep Rachel close to myself forever. I knew that, for some reason, my body in the well wasn't decaying. It was completely preserved after so many years, looking as if I had died just an hour ago. I assumed it was just because I was a paranormal, inhuman creature.

Just by thinking about my body, I suddenly had a foresight that I was going to live inside a human body again. As my foresights had never been wrong, I assumed that I would somehow obtain the ability of returning to my body if it got found and taken out by Rachel. So I decided to lead her to that. As I was able to use projected thermography on her, I could just directly tell her to go back to Shelter Mountain Inn, to break through the floor, unseal the well and get me out of there. But I didn't want to do that. As I didn't know if she would be really willing to adopt me after my resurrection, I wanted to enjoy those last four days during which I could have her full attention. I wanted her to investigate, I wanted to lead her through my life.

She had made a good start on the previous day, by printing a screenshot of the lighthouse. So on Sunday she visited a library where she found a book about America's lighthouses. She started to compare her screenshot to the pictures in the book and soon she found out that the lighthouse from my video was situated on Moesko Island. She immediately went to look up Moesko Island on the internet. She found a website containing a photo of several island's citizens around the lighthouse. One of those citizens was no more or less than Anna Morgan. Rachel recognized her face from the video and found her name on the website. That was her next query, after printing the previous website's content – Anna Morgan. As the Morgan horse farm used to be famous, there was a lot of information about Anna on the internet. But Rachel didn't only read on the internet about her, she also looked through some old newspapers articles. She found out about the horses and their mysterious suicides, about Anna's hallucinations and nightmares because of which she had been admitted to the hospital in Eola and about her suicide. Just as I had expected, her discoveries increased her curiosity and she decided to make a trip to Moesko Island. She made copies of several newspapers articles, to analyze them better on the ferry.

On Monday, the 5th day of my influence over Rachel's mind, Noah finally found out that the curse of my video was not just a high school rumor. Up to that day I was giving him some hallucinations and nightmares, mostly having him see images from my video in his surroundings, just like I had done to my previous victims. But that wasn't enough to get a fearless man like him upset. Although I hadn't tortured him as much as my first four victims because I was too focused on Rachel, his bravery was annoying me, I felt like giving him a hallucination of my demonic ghost appearing right in front of him and strangling him to death. Maybe that would have scared him enough to take me seriously. But I resisted to being so harsh on him. I knew that he would tell Rachel about such an experience and I didn't want to reveal my sadistic personality that soon, because I wanted to conquer Rachel's motherly feelings. But I knew I was going to get back on Noah for his bravery. He was going to pay for ignoring me! On that Monday, by buying cigarettes, he saw his blurred face on the monitor connected to the security camera. As it reminded him of photos he had taken of Rachel, he finally came to believe that he was cursed.

In the evening that day, Rachel came home after preparing everything for her trip to Moesko Island. After paying Aidan's babysitter and sending her home, she entered her child's room. Aidan looked like just falling asleep. As she didn't want to wake him up, she did not kiss him good night. I could imagine what was on her mind. She thought she had only two days left to live and she didn't know if she was going to make it back from Moesko Island to see her child again.

But the fact was that it was actually me who had only two days left. In two days I was going to lose my direct influence over Rachel's mind. I wasn't sure if she was going to find my body on time, so I had to speed the things up. I was lucky that Aidan wasn't able to easily fall asleep that night, so he got up soon after Rachel went to bed and he went to the living room. That was my moment.

I attracted his attention to my videotape. Being so stressed, Rachel hadn't been cautious enough to hide both of them away. Aidan took my tape, the copy that had been made for Noah and taken away from him, and he put it in the video deck. So I had him watch it too. I put my curse on Rachel's son. I did it for two reasons. First, I knew that Rachel was going to be more motivated to solve the riddle of my tape as soon as possible, knowing that her only child was sentenced to death unless she found a way to lift the curse. Second, I wanted to prolong my influence over her mind. As she was spending much time with Aidan, that was a way for me to manipulate her thoughts for additional five days. But I knew that Aidan probably wouldn't say anything to his mother on his own in the next two days, and I needed Rachel to be aware of the fact that he had watched my video. So while he was watching it, I gave her a nightmare.

In that nightmare I especially wanted to give her a hint that my tape hadn't been made by Anna Morgan, even though her face was the only one that could be clearly seen in the video. I wanted to introduce Rachel to something I had been through while living in a human body. I recalled my time in the Eola hospital, especially how disgusted I had felt when those doctors had medicated me and disabled my powers that way. The idea of being overpowered by humans had been so disgusting that it had made me feel sick. And I decided to give a similar sensation to Rachel.

So the dream I gave her started with her phoning her sister and asking her to look after Aidan while she is off to Moesko Island. During that call she suddenly started to feel sick by drinking some water, and cough heavily because of that. She was coughing for a few seconds and suddenly a wet thread, built of several intertwined strands of my hair, started to come out through her mouth. When she coughed the entire thing out, she saw an electrode attached to its end. It was just like those ones that the doctors had been attaching to me while studying me out. I had memorized them very well, just like other items from that hideous place.

After getting the entire thread out, Rachel tried to get back to the phone. But the call was cut by water appearing inside the phone and leaking out of it. She was confused by what she saw, but I didn't let her waste too much time on that. I made her think of Aidan. So she left the phone, forgetting the strange occurrence of water leaking out of it, and went to her child's room. After entering, she encountered a wide puddle of water. In the middle of it there was me, sitting on the same chair I had been sitting on in the hospital. That was the first time I showed myself to her. I made myself appear in my demonic form, just shrunk to the size of the little girl whose body I used to live in. That was another hint to Rachel about the real creator of the tape. But as she saw me from the back, she could only see my hair.

When she approached me close enough, I grabbed her wrist with my demonic arm and immediately projected one of my flashbacks into her mind. She suddenly found herself wearing my white dress, sitting on the chair in the same room where I had been examined by Doctor Scott, right in front of his camera and his desk messed with electrodes and my X-ray pictures. That experience left such a strong impression on her that she immediately woke up from her dream.

Having woken up she looked at her arm, which still hurt her after my grip. She saw a burned track of my hand. It wasn't really there, it was just a durable hallucination caused by me. She could see the child size of my hand, which was also meant to be a hint to her. But as soon as she came to her senses, she encountered another horrifying sensation. That was the sound of my video. The nightmare I had given her was mostly to let her know that Aidan was watching my tape. I made her wake up just in time to enter the living room right in the moment when the boy saw the sequence of the well. But that time I made them see that sequence a little different. For a brief moment they both saw my demonic arm and my black scalp leaning out of the well.

The video went static right at the moment when Rachel let a scream of terror by realizing that her child was sentenced to die in seven days, unless she found a cure in the two days that she allegedly had left to live. She knew that the boy was helpless, that he had no chance of finding the way of surviving on his own. I remember how she desperately hugged her doomed child, overwhelmed with her maternal instinct that was touching even my inhuman demonic soul. She desperately ejected the tape and threw it under the commode.

As I had my influence over Aidan, I immediately made him think of a little girl. He asked his mother who I was, and I remember how he called her _Rachel_, by her name. What a stupid kid he had to be, I thought, not to appreciate the bliss of having a mother like her enough for pronouncing the word _mother_. As she just hugged him tight, having no answer to his question, the phone rang. A few seconds later, Rachel ran to it, picked it up and threw it back down immediately. But it rang again. That time she picked it up, screaming:"LEAVE HIM ALONE!" But that phone call wasn't caused by my video. She yelled straight in Noah's ear over the phone. It was him calling her, to tell her that he had finally come to believe in my curse, after taking lots of photos of himself and constantly getting his face blurred on them. She told him that Aidan had watched the tape, referring to the child as _our son_. My assumption happened to be correct. Noah was her former boyfriend and Aidan's father. _Father..._ Just the thought of that word made me think of Richard and hate Noah even more, although he wasn't half as disgusting man as my adoptive father.

Next day was Tuesday, day 6. Rachel and Noah hadn't fallen asleep again. The only one that had fallen asleep was Aidan, the innocent boy who wasn't truly aware of the doomful danger of my video. In Tuesday morning, Rachel asked Ruth if she could look after Aidan while she is off to Moesko Island. She had probably got the idea from the dream I had given her. Her sister accepted.

In the early afternoon, a few minutes before Aidan was supposed to leave the school, Noah came to the school yard and waited for the boy to come. Rachel had asked him to pick him up and take him to Ruth's house. When Aidan came out, Noah secretly took a photo of him with his camera. He sighed when he saw Aidan's blurred face on the camera's screen. He had obviously taken the photo just to confirm that the boy was cursed.

During the drive, Aidan drew a doodle of an image I had projected into his mind – my old house on Moesko Island, with Richard, Anna and me walking away from it to our vehicle, to get on our trip to Shelter Mountain. After hearing the pencil noise, Noah asked him what he was drawing. Aidan said it was an image he had seen in his mind. Probably having assumed it had something to do with my video, Noah requested him to make one for Rachel too. Aidan finished drawing the same image on a second piece of paper not long after Noah parked the car in front of Ruth's house.

After leaving Aidan there, Noah gave Rachel a ride to the ferry. During the drive she told him everything she had found about Anna and asked him to do a research in the Eola hospital while she investigates on the island. He agreed with that. They separated in the harbor after he handed her Aidan's drawing. Not much later she got on the ferry which sailed away to Moesko Island.

While on the ferry, she started to read the newspapers articles she had copied on Sunday. In one of them she read that Richard and Anna had a daughter. I made that piece of information attract her attention. Not long after she read all the articles, I noticed a horse on the ferry behind a fence. That disgusting creature made me recall Richard's horses again. I also saw its eye. It looked just like the one from my video. I understood, that vision had been a foresight.

I was so disgusted by that hideous creature and the memories it brought to my mind that I decided to take its life away. So I made Rachel decide to take a walk around the boat. She came across that horse, apparently by pure coincidence. As she approached it, the animal's sixth sense perceived my presence and my hatred for it and its entire species. So it immediately became violent, just like Richard's horses had been under my influence. Rachel was scared as it, for apparently no reason, broke the fence and ran to the edge of the ferry, smashing a few vehicles on its way. People were staring at it in horror. And just like my adoptive father's creatures, it threw itself down into the ocean. The ferry sailed over it and the animal's body was ripped apart. Its blood contaminated the water around the boat. That sight, that happened to be another foresight that could be seen in my video, made its owner, also a passenger on board, scream in horror.

In the meantime, Noah visited the Eola hospital to investigate about Anna Morgan. He tricked the staff into revealing the location of the record room, which he wasn't really allowed to visit. I hated to admit that he was a very intelligent man. He found the record room and it didn't take him long to find the documents about Anna. He started to look through them and what attracted his biggest attention was a document saying about the many conceptions and miscarriages she had had before adopting me. At that moment I made his nose bleed. I did it on purpose, realizing that by wiping the blood off he was accidentally going to make some other documents drop on the floor and get his attention attracted to them. One of the dropped items was an envelope containing the documents regarding the studies of my projected thermography. A label on the envelope contained my name – _Samara Morgan_. After staring with fascination at my X-ray pictures for several seconds, he looked at the other side of the envelope, where he learned about the existence of a video called _#SM0015_. That was the video made by Doctor Scott. The last one he ever recorded.

Intrigued by those documents, Noah headed to the hospital's video library to look for the mentioned video. While talking to the librarian he presented himself as Richard Morgan, claiming that he preserved his young appearance with diet and exercise. He did have a sense of humor, but I hated that joke. Although he logically disbelieved him, the librarian was willing to let him watch that video, but soon he realized the tape was missing. It had been taken away by the real Richard Morgan, when he had requested my sessions to be terminated. Knowing that Rachel was on Moesko Island, Noah tried to call her, but the reception was so bad on the island that he was unable to reach her. So he decided to come after her.

Meanwhile, Rachel arrived on the island and visited the Morgan horse farm. Not long after coming she recognized the house from my video. The house where I had lived before getting locked in the barn. As nobody answered at the door, she walked around and just a minute later she found Richard hammering some nails into a wooden fence. At that moment I saw that man after such a long time. He had gotten so old, his eyes looked so exhausted and tired of life. He was living completely alone. Never got married again. And he had no horses anymore. He must have sold the last ones away years ago. They had most likely reminded him of Anna's death, so he had gotten rid of them. I was maliciously delighted to see that.

As soon as Rachel approached him and asked for a few minutes of his time, he assumed she wanted to talk about the horses. He was quite unfriendly with her, but at first he was willing to answer her questions anyway. She started by asking about the horses. Richard said they had gone crazy, without mentioning me. He was obviously still struggling to forget about me, after all those years. He seemed to have resigned with his destiny and found some kind of peace. By seeing that I decided to give him a little more pain after all that time, to let him know that I still hadn't forgotten. But I decided to just observe the situation for the beginning.

Rachel recognized Anna's oval mirror and started to examine it with her stare. Richard interrupted her, impatiently asking what was on her mind. Then she took my tape out and said it was probably a message from Anna. In spite of my hints, she still hadn't realized that Anna hadn't been the creator of my video. She started to describe the images from the video, especially the ones including Anna's appearance. By the apparently empty expression of Richard's face I realized he was recalling my powers, putting the facts together and realizing that the tape had been made by me, that my doomful influence hadn't ended with my death and Anna's suicide.

Suddenly overwhelmed with terror and fury, he grabbed a sharp hook and started to walk closer to Rachel. I recognized his madness, he was so outraged by her bringing my tape that he wanted to kill her with the hook.

_Touch her and you're dead! _I projected words into his mind in that moment. _I never left, Richard, I've been here all this time. Your wife did nothing by throwing me down that well! _

He heard my demonic voice pronouncing those words. I couldn't let that hideous old man hurt the woman that I wanted to become my new mother. Though, I could have just made him change his mind about it, but I preferred scaring him. That was the punishment he deserved for even thinking for a single second of hurting Rachel.

As my voice faded away, he stopped walking closer to her and he just asked her where she had got that tape from. When she mentioned Shelter Mountain, he recognized the name of that place. He asked if that was the only one and she said she had made one copy. But before he could react, he heard my voice again.

_Drop it, daddy! _I whispered in his ear. _I'm not kidding! _

He couldn't ignore me anymore and he threw the hook in a wooden box. But he became even more unfriendly with Rachel, maybe even thinking that she had brought my curse to him with a bad intention. So he opened the door to signalize her the way out of his house, refusing to answer any of her further questions. But the persistent Rachel asked where his daughter was, recalling what she had read in the newspapers. He said he didn't have a daughter and requested her to leave him alone. As she stepped out, he slammed the door right in front of her face.

After leaving that house Rachel started to look around and then she suddenly remembered Aidan's drawing. She looked at it and immediately recognized the house, in spite of Aidan's poor drawing skills. She saw the girl on the drawing, which finally started to make her think that the tape maybe hadn't been made by Anna. As she noticed that, she took her phone and called her child, who was sitting in his aunt's living room and drawing. Mostly things I was projecting into his mind. At the moment of Rachel's call he was drawing a big black circle with several ladders around it.

Rachel asked him why he had drawn the house and where he had seen it. Influenced by me, he told her about _the little girl_ who showed him things. Among other things, I had projected into his mind the image of the house, images of fire and other disasters that used to happen on the island while I had lived there, an image of myself sitting in the barn above the horses at night, an image of me in the well... He misunderstood some of those images. He thought that my eternal insomnia had been caused by the horses. And he didn't know that the dark place he had seen was the bottom of a well. But I didn't want to show him things clearly. I wanted to keep Rachel investigating, I wanted to be the center of her attention at least for a little while more. She was confused and almost terrified when Aidan told her I was living in a dark place.

But she had no time for emotions. She immediately got away from the farm and visited Doctor Grasnik, the doctor of Moesko Island. She had found out about her in some of the articles she had read. That woman used to attend Anna and me for a while, before referring us to the Eola hospital. As soon as Rachel mentioned the Morgans and their daughter, the doctor became nervous. But unlike Richard, she was willing to answer all her questions. She told her that the Morgans had adopted me, that everything had been fine until Anna had started to suffer from visions, hallucinations and nightmares and that I had been putting them in her head. She said that everything had become better on the island since I had gone. But that useless old woman had no idea about everything that had happened. She thought Anna and I were still in the Eola hospital.

As soon as she finished her conversation with Doctor Grasnik, Rachel went back to the farm. She was already desperate, believing she had only one day left to live and that her son had only six unless she found a way to survive the curse. The only thing left for her to do was to beg Richard for more information. As she arrived, she knocked at the door. But there was no answer. So she just tried to open the door on her own. In a situation like hers it seemed acceptable to enter someone's property with no authorization. Nobody seemed to be there.

Probably believing that Richard was asleep, she decided to dig through his possessions and find some more information. In the living room she found a card box next to the TV set. There were the items from the Eola hospital – the electrodes and some documents about me. But what attracted Rachel's attention was a tape in the video deck. The title written on the label was: _#SM0015_.

She played the tape. That was the first time she ever saw my face, in that video filmed by Doctor Scott. But that man wasn't the only one who had fallen for my fake behavior of a shy and abused child. I observed Rachel's face while she was watching that video. She sympathized with me and really developed the desire to help me, probably recalling Aidan's words about me living in a dark place and foreboding I was dead.

But she didn't notice that Richard was there. He had come in while she was watching the video and he observed her. As soon as the video was over, he approached her and hit her in the head with an extension cord he was holding. I couldn't let that action of his go unpunished. I didn't know why was he originally holding the extension cord, but I knew he was going to do something completely different. Under _my_ influence!

I forced his mind to recall the whispers of my demonic voice that had prevented him from hurting Rachel with the hook. He started to recall them so vividly, and to think of the fact that I had come back after so many years to ruin the peace he had managed to find. My projection was so strong that it made him decide to do the most fatal thing. To take his own life away!

He took the TV set right in front of Rachel's face and walked upstairs with it. She got up and teetered after him, still in pain after getting hit by him. She started to yell at him for killing his own daughter, believing after seeing that video of me subtly presenting him as an abusive father that he had committed that homicide on his own. But for the moment I let her believe so. After all, he _was_ the one who had talked Anna into taking me down.

Rachel continued running after him and begging him to tell her more, to help her find a way to save her son's life. She got desperately terrified when she saw him flooding the bathroom, surrounded by several electronic devices. But he just stepped into the bathtub, ignoring her despair, and electrocuted himself without giving any useful information.

Shocked by that sight, Rachel left the bathroom and started to run down the corridor, screaming in terror. But she was stopped by Noah who had just arrived. I remember the awful feeling that overwhelmed my soul when I saw him comforting her, when I saw her trembling in the arms of that man I despised. I remember how he put his hands on her cheeks, how she looked up to his face and how they almost had a kiss of romantic reconciliation. That was too bad for me. It was unacceptable for Rachel to give her precious attention to a man. I was reluctant to allow Noah to become a second Richard Morgan in my lifeless existence after I find a way to stay with Rachel as her child.

As she calmed down after the shock she had suffered, she went with Noah to the barn. There they found the upper floor where Richard used to keep me locked up. As I hadn't been there for a long time, I noticed that everything was just as I had left it by leaving the barn, except for the walls which were covered in wallpapers with horse head icons. Rachel climbed the ladder to get to that floor and Noah followed her. When she climbed high enough to see my room, I used telekinesis to make the old music box rotate and play its melody.

When Rachel and Noah came up, they started observing all the items of the room – the bed, the chair, the TV set, the music box and horse-themed toys. After a few minutes of their observation, I attracted Noah's attention to the seam between two of the wallpapers. A piece of the wooden wall under it was seen. It was burned. Influenced by me, Noah noticed it and showed it to Rachel. The two of them ripped the wallpaper apart and saw the image of the tree in Shelter Mountain I had projected onto that wall, while seeing it as an unclear foresight. Rachel recognized the tree. She knew exactly where she had seen it.

As there was nothing left for them to do on Moesko Island, they decided to go back where everything had started for them – Shelter Mountain Inn. It was their last hope. They didn't know it was actually _my _last hope. I had only one day left to find some way to keep Rachel's attention forever.

It was Wednesday, day 7, when the two of them came there. The trip took them a lot of time and the Sun had almost gone down when they arrived. They entered cabin 12. Noah started to observe the interior of the cabin as he had never been there before. They looked around for a few minutes and then Rachel suddenly became pessimistic. As they hadn't found any way to survive, she thought it was just a question of minutes when she was going to die. Her pessimistic attitude made Noah nervous and angry and he started to tear the things down, shouting at me to tell them what I wanted.

And I showed them, just as he requested. By messing the room in his anger, he accidentally took down a vase full of marbles. As those marbles started to roll spontaneously across the floor, I used telekinesis on them and attracted Rachel's attention to what I was doing. I arranged the marbles to form an arrow on the carpet. As she noticed that and showed it to Noah, the two of them removed the carpet and found a burned ring-shaped track on the wooden floor. It had appeared when I had used my powers to transfer the energy of my dying thoughts from the well through the lid and the wooden floor onto the videotape.

Noah found a hammer there and started to hit the floor with it. It didn't take him long to make a big hole in the floor and the abandoned sealed well was revealed. After finding that well, he and Rachel stepped down through the broken floor and found themselves right in front of my circular grave, which was still full of cold, dark water after all those years.

They pushed the lid away and saw the deep darkness of the well. I needed Rachel to go down there, to find my body. But she seemed to be hesitant about it. She took a rock and threw it down, to figure out approximately how deep the well was. But she couldn't even see when it dropped down.

As she was hesitant, I just couldn't take a chance. I had to force her to go down. So I gave her and Noah a mutual hallucination of a huge swarm of flies rising up from the well and attacking their faces. It distracted them and made them lose their balance for a brief moment. That moment was enough for me to make the TV set from above drop right on Rachel's chest and knock her down the well. Her scream echoed in the entire room, together with the shocked Noah's voice shouting her name.

Rachel fell unconscious by dropping into the water of the well, but I made her wake up before it could put her life in danger. Noah was still shouting after her and she shouted back to him to let him know she was alright. He went to find something to take her out and she found her flashlight that she had accidentally dropped down the well while defending herself from the hallucinated swarm of flies. By using the flashlight she found the nails I had lost on the rocks of the well, thus noticing that I hadn't died right after being thrown down.

At that moment I used telekinesis to pull the lid over the well again, while Noah was getting a rope to help Rachel out. I did it because I knew I was going through the last seconds of my direct influence over Rachel's mind. I wanted to be alone with her, away from the rest of the world. At least for a little while.

She started to panic and shout Noah's name after the well got closed. But Noah wasn't close enough to hear her. Then she started to look around, illuminating the interior of the well with the flashlight. In a few seconds she spontaneously directed it to the water and found my hair. In that moment I gave her a hallucination of my hand grabbing her wrist. It was the last thing I could do before losing my direct influence over her. Just like in the nightmare she had had, after feeling the grip of my hand she had a vision.

I made her see the truth about my death. I made her see myself standing in front of the well and singing, Anna approaching me, talking to me, putting a bag over my head, knocking me unconscious and throwing me down. I made her see me waking up and seeing the light fading away as the lid was getting pulled over the well, showing me a white ring which had been my only company during the last seven days of my life.

After waking up from her vision, she didn't see my corpse immediately. But she looked at her arm. The print of my hand was gone. I lost my direct influence over her. She misunderstood the disappearance of the print, though. She thought it was signalizing the disappearance of my curse, while it only meant the expiration of my influence over her. But although she believed my curse was gone, she continued looking for my body. She wanted to help me, to bring peace to my soul. Those were the feelings that I had wanted to make her feel. It seemed like I was achieving my goal. I knew that her desire to help me could evolve to real motherly feelings for me.

Just a few seconds later, she found my body. She was so overwhelmed with emotions that she didn't even have time to wonder why it hadn't rotten away in water after so many years. She took it in her arms as several strands of my wet hair covered her left hand. She was moved deep inside while holding me in her arms. My body of a little human girl, which I never really was, looked so peaceful and innocent. Rachel cried while holding me and gently moving my hair off my face.

"It's OK now." I remember her saying. "It's OK."

What I felt in that moment of my lifeless body laid in Rachel's arms was the purest thing that had ever touched my inhuman soul. Although my influence over her had already been gone, I could feel her strong desire to help the lost soul of a child who, she thought, had unintentionally been harming the others with her uncontrollable powers. I knew I was never going to forget the touch of her fingers on the forehead of my corpse. She wanted to help me as much as she would have wanted to help her own child. I could feel it. I felt myself accepted by her as her own child.

But several seconds after she took me out of the water, Noah arrived and opened the well, shouting for her. As the well got opened, my body rotted away in just a few moments. The only thing left in Rachel's arms was my bones and my soaking wet white dress. At that moment I recalled my foresight of living in a human body again. Was it possible that it had been wrong, I wondered. My body had just rotten away, there was no possible way of my soul returning back to it.

But it surprisingly didn't feel so bad. I had a mysterious inexplicable feeling. I felt a part of me getting unleashed, set free at the moment of the well getting opened while I was laid in Rachel's arms. I didn't immediately know what it meant, but I suddenly felt that I wasn't going to lose my contact with Rachel. She still had two tapes with my video in her house. I knew I could still communicate with her through those items. I might not have got a living body again, but I was still able to be there, next to her, enjoying her motherly feelings for my inhuman soul. That feeling was so unusually pure and warm that I suddenly found myself not minding Aidan being there too, as my brother. Unusually, Rachel's love seemed to be enough for me, even if I had to share it with her other child. My goal was accomplished. Or so it seemed.

A few seconds later, she let my bones go and the freezing coldness of the water came to her mind in that moment. Noah threw the rope and helped her out. The police and the firefighters arrived soon, to take my body out of the well and organize my funeral. Noah came to Rachel, who was sitting wrapped in a blanket, still soaking wet and under deep impression, terrified by the thought of Anna, who had wanted a child more than anything in the world, throwing me down that well and leaving me to die there. The impression I had left on her was just the one I had wanted to leave. She thought that I had just wanted to be heard, that making the video had been my way of expressing myself, just like drawing was Aidan's way. She had no idea that I had originally wanted to spread my pain around the world. My desire for her motherly love had appeared spontaneously after I had accidentally come across her. But it didn't mean I had forgotten my original wish, my destiny. To spread my pain, my curse. _Everyone will suffer!_

Noah pulled his terrified and cold ex girlfriend closer to himself and hugged her to warm her up. I sensed the awakening of their old romantic feelings, which I didn't like at all. I could eventually accept Aidan as my brother, but not sharing Rachel's attention with a man. Fortunately, none of the two kept thinking of my curse. Noah took his survival for granted. That was good for me. I had to get rid of him, although he really resulted in being a good man. He did express his sympathy for me, wondering how long one could survive sealed down a well. Rachel came up with the answer – _seven days_.

I was dwelling around them as the ghost I was and listening to them, terrified by the idea of them getting together again. I still had my influence over Noah. I could have projected some eerie thoughts into his mind and get him away from Rachel for a moment. But he was in love with her and that was a feeling I wasn't able to get out of his heart. So there was only one thing left for me to do – not to reveal the key of surviving to any one of them. Noah had to die!

After leaving Shelter Mountain, he and Rachel picked the exhausted Aidan up from Ruth's house and Noah gave them a ride home. After Rachel put Aidan to bed, Noah left her apartment. She couldn't imagine it was the last time she saw her ex boyfriend alive. That night she fell asleep next to Aidan, believing that the curse of my video was gone for good. She wanted to spend the entire next day with her child. I liked the idea, knowing that my tapes were still in her apartment and that I could spend the day with her too.

For a moment I thought of her job and realized it was going to prevent her from paying her full attention to me. But I didn't mind. Unlike Anna who was neglecting me because of the horses, Rachel was working in order to maintain her child. Everything she was doing was because of him. She never neglected her child just because of a hobby or such a thing.

But the next day wasn't as beautiful as I thought it was going to be. Aidan was still cursed and I had to let Rachel know. If I hadn't done it, Aidan would have died and Rachel would have never forgiven me. As I still had my influence over the boy, I made him wake up early in the morning and wonder about me. I made him want to know what had happened with me. Rachel told him that I had been set free and put to rest in peace. In that moment I made the boy's nose bleed and I gave them a mutual hallucination of a burned track of my hand on his wrist. Under my influence she saw on him the same symptoms she had experienced, which was my way to let her know that my curse hadn't been lifted. Feeling my dark energy still present, Aidan told her she hadn't been supposed to help me, hinting that I could never rest in peace because I never slept. Terrified by realizing that my curse was still active, Rachel started to think of Noah.

In the meantime, that man was sitting at the desk in his apartment. That hideous fearless human, he had already stopped thinking about me! He didn't know he was living his last minutes. So when the time finally came, I made his TV set turn itself on and show a static screen. The white noise distracted Noah and he got up to turn the TV off. He was just confused by it, not scared at all. His lack of fear was so annoying! I knew how much I was going to enjoy scaring him to death, much more than I had enjoyed victimizing Rachel's niece and three of her friends.

Before Noah came back to his desk, the TV set was activated again, showing the image of the well. The portal to Terror's Realm was opened. Noah wasn't so indifferent anymore. At that moment his phone rang and he finally started to feel the fear. He didn't know the phone call was coming from Rachel, who was intending to alert him. Convinced that it was coming from me, he didn't pick up. Then I used my influence on him to make him approach the screen and stare at it with curiosity and fear, instead of trying to run away.

He saw my grownup demonic apparition climbing out of the well and approaching the portal. I projected such an enormous amount of fear into his mind that he lost his balance and started to crawl backwards as I crawled out of the screen. He was somehow able to get up and walk backwards, but at that moment I stood up too and teleported myself a few centimeters forward, appearing much closer to him. As he reflexively stepped further back he fell over a shelf, knocking it down with the mass of his body, and injured his hands. Terrified by my appearance, he started to crawl away. His gasps of ultimate fear were feeding my demonic soul, whose visualization was stepping closer to him and leaving wet tracks on his floor.

At the moment when he spontaneously looked at me again, still crawling backwards in terror, I raised my head. My hair moved aside and revealed my resentful wrinkled face staring at him and making him see my dying thoughts, whose rapid projection scared him to death, just like it had happened to my previous four victims. I enjoyed the culmination of his fear, I enjoyed the last scream of that man who would have stolen a part of Rachel's attention from me if I had let him live.

I got lost from his sight at the moment when the skin of his face got distorted and started to melt away. With the last molecules of his strength, he got up and teetered to his armchair where he finally dropped down dead. Before the closing of the portal to Terror's Realm, I created a water puddle under the armchair.

Just a few seconds later Rachel arrived to his place. She found his TV on and tracks of his blood in his flooded and demolished apartment. She cautiously approached his chair and turned it around, a second before letting a scream of horror by seeing the distorted face of his corpse. The expression she kept on her face after that was enough for me to understand how she felt. She lost the man she loved, but the fear of losing her son due to my curse wasn't giving her time for grieving Noah's death.

When she arrived home, she yelled at Aidan to go to his room. That was the first and only time that her despair made her shout at her child. As Aidan ran away, shocked by her unexpected behavior, she grabbed my first videotape and desperately smashed it against the ground, trying to figure out what I really wanted and why she was the only one that had survived my curse. Even my demonic soul was hurt when she threw the pieces of my broken tape into the fireplace. But I couldn't reproach her for that act of despair. After all, I still had the copy she had made. That was my way to keep communicating with her.

But that was the moment to let her know how to survive. I had to save Aidan if I didn't want her to hate me. Besides that, I couldn't let her just burn the second tape as well and thus eradicate my influence from Earth. I wouldn't have been able to make a new one so easily. As a ghost I had the power of projecting thoughts into other humans' minds, but not onto physical surfaces or media. For that I needed the energy of a living body. I had been able to make the first video because the energy of my last living thoughts had been accumulated in the well. But that energy had been spent back then, so it would be impossible to make another tape that way. So I had to let Rachel know that she had to make another copy of my tape to save Aidan.

I started by attracting her attention to the copy she had made for Noah. As she took it in her hands, I projected some flashbacks into her mind. I made her see myself in the Eola hospital, Richard saying that his wife hadn't been supposed to have a child, Anna throwing me down the well, Aidan saying that I never slept, Richard telling her she was spreading his tragedy like a sickness, the dead distorted faces of Katie and Noah and me saying that my influence wouldn't stop. By putting all those memories together, Rachel figured out the way she had saved herself – by copying my tape and showing it to someone else.

For a moment I was surprised by the fact I could project such vivid thoughts into her mind just via physical presence of my tape, without having my direct influence over her. But then I recalled the moment of my corpse rotting away in her arms as Noah opened the well. I remembered the feeling of a part of me being unleashed and I finally came to understand that feeling.

My body hadn't rotten away during all those years because I had been a hybrid of a human and a water demon. Water had been keeping the body preserved. But when it had been taken out and got in touch with the fresh air after the well had been opened, my flesh had transformed into demonic energy which had risen out of the well, causing my powers growing stronger.

However, although Aidan had five days left to live, Rachel didn't want to waste a single second. She came to her child's room and gave him a gentle hug, apologizing for having shouted at him who had no fault. She explained him everything and took him to her video devices in the Seattle P.I. building. Instructed by her, he made a copy of my tape and asked her what was going to happen to the next person who was going to watch it. She didn't want to say anything. She didn't want to tell him that she was going to let a random innocent person die in order to save his life.

After making a copy of the tape, she came home with the boy and burned the copy she had made for Noah. Only one my tape was left. Her actions became strange and I didn't like them at all. I was overwhelmed with the bitter intuitive feeling of disappearance of the motherly love she had started to feel for me by taking me out of the well. But for the moment I was just observing the situation, too worried and upset to think clearly and make a rational decision. That was my worst mistake.

She took the fresh copy of the tape and drove with it to the closest video store. There she left it, unboxed and unlabelled, on a random shelf and started to observe it from the distance, waiting for someone to take it. Then I started to use my powers on her, making her want to take it back home. But she resisted that urge, maybe even having figured out it was coming from my influence on her mind.

Several minutes later, a young adult stranger came and noticed my unlabelled tape. Intrigued by that unusual occurrence, he took it to the cashier, asking him what was on it. The cashier didn't know, so he told the man that the tape wasn't from there and he allowed him to take it home. I couldn't be sure what was on Rachel's mind, but I assumed she had decided not to let that victim know how to survive. She probably preferred him to die and be my last victim, instead of copying the tape and showing it to someone else, thus spreading my influence further and putting more human lives in danger. I could understand that she preferred a stranger's death over the death of her own child, but I loathed the fact that she wanted to get away from me.

As that stranger took my tape away, I lost my chance to stay permanently in touch with Rachel. Knowing that my influence over Aidan was going to disappear in less than five days, I immediately started to think of how to use that influence for keeping Rachel close to myself. When she was next to the boy, I had the ability of projecting instant feelings like shock, fear or sympathy into her mind. But an emotion like love was something too big for me, something that had to be born inside a heart and I was unable to force Rachel to feel it for me.

When she arrived home, I started to force Aidan to speak for me. He started to tell her that she had to find my tape and bring it back. That was my desperate attempt. But she realized that he was speaking under my influence, because his words were a contradiction to what he had said about me a few minutes before Noah's demise. So she determinedly ignored what he was saying. There was nothing I could do about that. I seemed to be defeated.

But soon it got even worse for me. Rachel realized someone might have seen her putting my tape on the shelf. As she obviously wanted to get rid of everything that had to do with me, she took some suitcases out and started to pack her and Aidan's possessions. She hired her several acquaintances to help her move out of Seattle. She was running away with her child and there was nothing I could do to stop her. Or at least nothing that could come to my mind in a moment like that.

They quickly left Seattle and moved to Astoria. With help of her acquaintances it didn't take Rachel long to find a quite cheap apartment for rent in that town. She also got a job at a daily newspaper called Daily Astorian.


	8. Chapter 6

_Devastated by her new mother Rachel abandoning her, the restless Samara is looking for a way to get close to her again. Her love for that motherly figure seems to be invincible and unconditional. And this time she's doing something she has never done before._

* * *

**The memories: Possessing a child**

When I lost my influence over Aidan, which however hadn't been enough for me to do with Rachel what I wanted, I realized that the only thing I could do in Astoria was dwell around Rachel, without being able to communicate with her, without being able to make her aware of my presence. So I decided to leave, until I found a way to regain my influence over her.

For the beginning, I paid more attention to that man in Seattle who had taken the most recent copy of my tape home. His name was Frank. After he watched my video, I got my influence over him. I had a chance of torturing him with my telepathic abilities for seven days before my curse would end up taking his life away. But I also felt that there was much more I could do with him, much more than I had been able to do with all my previous victims.

I had the possibility of projecting my memories and my inhuman powers into his brain, thus progressively suppressing his consciousness, which could result in me possessing his body. For a moment I wondered where that new ability had come from, but then I recalled that feeling of a part of me being unleashed at the moment when Noah had opened the well.

Suddenly everything made sense to me. That was another new ability I had obtained when my powers had grown stronger because of the flesh of my corpse transforming into dark energy and rising up from the well. But I didn't want to use my new abilities on Frank, because I knew it would be a long procedure and I had no use for possessing his body. I had a different plan for him. I knew that, if I let him die from my curse, maybe no one would watch my video again and my influence would be eradicated.

So the night after he watched the video I gave him a nightmare. I made him appear in Morgan's house, right in front of Anna's oval mirror. The first thing he saw in it was his own reflection. But then he remembered he had seen that mirror in the mysterious video that had left him with a strong feeling that he had only seven days left to live, just as my voice in the phone had hinted him. As soon as he started to think of the video, his reflection in the mirror metamorphosed into the image of me, just as I appeared in one of the sequences of my video. Frank was startled by my appearance. But he had an even stronger shock when the picture of the little human girl in the mirror changed into my current demonic self. My demonic arm emerged from the mirror and grabbed his wrist. He screamed in terror, but I didn't let him wake up yet. Instead, he saw me raise my head and reveal my face, pronouncing words in my demonic voice.

"If you want to make it past the seventh day, make a copy of my tape." I told him. "Have another human watch it! Do not destroy the one you have!"

As I pronounced those words, I took my hand off his wrist and my picture faded away from the mirror, which showed his reflection again. But not for a long time. Just a second later he woke up, breaking the dead silence of the night with his scream of deep horror.

Next day he made a copy of my tape, just as I had told him to do. He tricked a friend of his, a teenager named Tony, into watching it. As soon as Tony watched the video, Frank explained him everything and let him know what he had to do in order to survive. Fortunately, Tony didn't disbelieve him.

So, as the time went on, the number of my tapes was growing and I had my influence in more and more locations. I was using my powers on all the viewers of my video, torturing them with hallucinations and nightmares until they made the freshest copy of the tape and had a new victim watch it. After all, that was what I had been born for. Making mankind suffer.

I could use all the seven days of my influence on my victims, but I decided to leave them alone after they lifted the curse from themselves. Torturing them any longer would be a waste of time, because I had a greater goal to achieve – to spread my influence all the way to Astoria.

So I was subtly giving hints to my victims, projecting into their minds ideas about who they could pass the newest tape to. That way I was directing the spreading of my influence all the way from Seattle to Astoria. Of course, there were some humans who accidentally came across one of my tapes and watched it. As the way of surviving had already been revealed, those were also making copies and passing them further, so my influence was getting spread everywhere around the United States, especially by some of the viewers who were travelling during their seven days.

But the distribution of my tapes also had a side effect. People became curious about the video spreading the mysterious curse, they wanted to find out who had made it, where it had come from. So they were not passing their freshest copy of the tape to another human just to survive, but also to investigate. The first community of investigators of my video was founded in Seattle, where it had started with Frank. Inspired by the image of the ring, which was the first sequence of my video and one of the images most frequently projected into the viewers' minds, they called their community _Ring_. But as not only the citizens of Seattle were intrigued enough to investigate, but also the people in other parts of the United States, they decided to set up a website where all the humans involved with my video could interchange their experiences. They called it _Rings_.The number of its users was growing very fast.

The _Rings _members' method of investigation was much different from Rachel's one. They realized that the hallucinations I was causing them could be captured with a camera, which was sensitive to ghostly activity just like most of technology, so they were filming videos and posting them on the website, discussing them and developing theories. _Document everything you see _– that was their motto.

Their videos were containing images of ladders, rings, maggots, flies and other things I was making them see, including even some brief appearances of me, mostly in my demonic form shrunk to child size. I knew they would find my pale wrinkled skin more frightening on a child's body than an adult's. I would sometimes show them my adult demonic form in their nightmares, but it was mostly reserved for the death moment.

The _Rings _members' goal was to find out what a victim experienced on the day 7, believing it was going to make them figure out the origin and the meaning of the video. Of course, some of them didn't succeed in having someone watch their copy in seven days, so they died. I knew that a big part of mankind was going to die because of my video. But that was alright. After all, making mankind suffer was what I had been born for.

From the moment when Frank passed his copy of the tape to Tony, it took only a few days for some travelers to spread my tapes to other parts of the United States. Ironically, I had to wait six months for my tapes to reach Astoria. I suddenly had a strong premonition when one of them was watched by a 17 years old Astorian boy named Jake. May be because he lived quite close to Rachel, who had recently bought a house and left the rented apartment.

Jake was intrigued by the tape because many of his friends, members of the_ Rings _community, were talking about it very often. So he decided to get involved and soon after he watched my video he was introduced to the community.

It was 11:00 PM when he watched the tape. The other members of the community told him he was going to pass his copy to a friend named Timmy, who had accepted to be the next one. But that didn't fit my plans. For some reason, I wanted Jake to die. My strong premonition was telling me that he would be more useful dead than alive.

As the motto of _Rings _was "Document everything you see", that was what Jake was doing. He was probably the most dedicated member of the community. He was recording his surroundings with his camera almost all the time, capturing all the visions and hallucinations caused by me, writing about them in a journal and showing his recordings to his friends, even to the ones who had not been involved. He was also spending a lot of time on the website of _Rings_, watching videos posted by previous members and participating in discussions.

He was unusually fascinated at first, while I was still easy on him, just making him see a ladder, rings of light, flies and similar harmless things. He was so fascinated that I started to think of the original purpose of my video – making humans _suffer_. So I decided to get harder on him.

It was his fourth day when I started to give him more disturbing hallucinations like maggots, and nightmares in which he was getting attacked by my demonic self. I also realized a good side effect of what I was doing to him. Other members of _Rings _were fascinated with his videos, encouraging him to resist until the seventh day and share his experiences with them, since no one had ever recorded the seventh day before.

On his sixth day he started to panic and asked Timmy to watch the tape. But as I was reluctant to let him survive, I influenced Timmy's mind in Jake's presence to make him refuse to watch it. I made him be willing to put Jake's life in danger in order to get some videos of the seventh day. As my powers had grown stronger after my corpse had been found in the well, I also found myself able to influence the minds of humans my victims were having phone conversations with. So whoever Jake asked to watch the tape, I made them refuse. Jake had to die!

He really was the first member of _Rings _that endured until the seventh day. In the evening that day, after many futile attempts to have someone watch his copy of the tape and save his life, he phoned a girl who had romantic interests in him. Her name was Emily. Instead of asking her to watch the tape, he asked her out. I didn't influence her mind to make her refuse. As I found Jake's panic very pleasant, I wanted to give him a false relief. I knew how delighted I was going to be when he got shocked by realizing he was sentenced to death after all. Besides that, I had a chance of depriving that girl of her mental health if she found herself next to Jake in the moment of his death. However, as she was surprised and confused by his call, she said she had to think about meeting him that night.

After that conversation, exhausted after all the terror he had been through, Jake fell asleep for a few minutes. But those few minutes were enough for me to give him a nightmare. In that nightmare Emily was late for their meeting and his deadline moment came. The power suddenly went out and he had a hallucination of the room raining as if he was outside. Then the TV turned itself on in spite of the power outage, showing a static screen. Just a few seconds later, the well appeared on the screen, signalizing the opening of the portal to Terror's Realm.

After seeing me climbing out of the well, Jake broke the screen, thinking it was a way to stop me. Then he tried to leave the house, but in that moment all the doors closed and locked themselves. Then I emerged from his TV set, just as if he hadn't broken the screen. In spite of all the terror and fright, in his last moment he grabbed his camera and started to film me. As he did that, I gave him the eeriest shock. My demonic arm suddenly penetrated through the camera's screen and painfully squeezed his face. That horrifying sensation broke his dream and he woke up.

It was apparently still not too late for him. There was one hour left before his deadline. Just a second later he received a phone call from Emily. She accepted to go out with him and they met in a few minutes. They spent some time outside and then he took her to his house. There he requested her to watch the tape, telling her it was just a scary movie. He was extremely nervous, knowing that he had only two minutes left to live unless she watched the video. So he didn't reveal her its true content.

I allowed her to accept. In that moment, Jake left the room and went to the kitchen. He didn't want to watch the video again. I made him decide that, to prevent him from seeing how Emily, influenced by the fear I was purposefully projecting into her, covered her eyes with her hands while my video was playing. She played it, but she did not watch it. By doing that she avoided getting cursed and sentenced her eventual boyfriend to death.

A few seconds before Jake's deadline moment, I gave him a hallucination of dark water flooding the kitchen, forming a skull-like image around his feet. Terrified by that image, he entered the living room and noticed that Emily had not really watched the tape. Right after realizing that his time was up and that he was sentenced to death, he saw the image of the well on the screen. The portal to Terror's Realm was opened.

Emily released her ultimate scream at the moment when I took my visible form and penetrated through the screen into the room. Terrified by my demonic appearance, she ran to the basement, screaming while the last molecules of her mental health were replaced by my dark energy. Just like most of my previous victims, Jake passed away in front of the TV with the partially melted skin of his eerily distorted face, while I was flooding the entire room with water teleported from Terror's Realm.

My premonition grew stronger when the police came to the house. Jake's lifeless body was taken to an ambulance as two officers took the speechlessly frightened Emily to their car. I found out my intuition had made no mistake when I saw a person entering the ambulance and approaching Jake's corpse. That person was Rachel! My lost new mother. She had probably heard about Jake's mysterious death and came to see if it had been caused by me.

She started to unzip the body bag, probably intending to look at Jake's face to see if he had died from what she was suspecting. I could see how she was overwhelmed with horror by seeing his distorted face and realizing that my influence had come all the way from Seattle to Astoria.

As I finally had my influence over her in presence of my victim's corpse, I manifested myself to her and grabbed her wrist while she was trying to zip the body bag back up. It hurt my inhuman soul when she gave me a terrified look and forcefully took her arm out of my grip. It was obvious she didn't love me anymore. She only wanted to get away from me.

But that was not enough to destroy my feelings for her. I still loved her just the same and wanted her to be my mother. So I was reluctant to let her go again. As my powers had become stronger after my body had been found in the well, I had developed the ability of influencing even the humans who had survived my curse, after they got in touch with my dark energy. And as Jake's body was full of it that was what I needed to regain my influence over Rachel. I started to think of what I could do to stay in touch with her and earn her motherly feelings again.

The answer came to me that same night. Not in a very pleasant way, though. Rachel visited Jake's place. She entered after finding a key hidden under a rock near the house. She found my videotape in the living room and took it to her car. Then she drove away to a forest, where she lit the fire in a trashcan.

I was horrified when she ripped my tape apart and threw its pieces on fire. That act of hers was the strongest proof that she didn't want me close to herself. I was not only made sad by that painful fact. My demonic soul was overwhelmed with madness and rage. As I was watching my tape burning away, I recalled the moment when she had set my first tape on fire. I recalled projecting my thoughts into her mind to let her know how to save Aidan. How ungrateful she was to me! She wanted me to go away, although I had helped her save her child.

_Her child! _As Aidan came to my mind while I was looking at my tape burning, I suddenly realized what I had to do to recover Rachel's motherly feelings for me. Although I was angry at her, I still loved her as my mother. My bodiless soul was still living for her. And there was only one thing I could do to make her love me again. I had to become _her child_. I had to become Aidan.

I remembered the moment when I had discovered the possibility of possessing Frank's body. It would have been useless with him, but it seemed different when I figured out the way of making Rachel love me again. That way was to become Aidan. It meant I had to possess his body. For a moment I found myself wondering why I hadn't done it before, right after being released from the well, while still having my direct influence over that boy. But then I realized it must have been impossible at that time, because Aidan had watched my video while my body had still been stuck down in the well.

When Rachel came home, her child was already asleep. She walked easily closer to him and gently kissed his forehead. At that moment of their physical touch, after the contact she had had with Jake's corpse, I regained the influence over Aidan as well. So I started to think what I had to do in order to possess his body.

It wasn't as easy as it might have seemed. As neither Rachel nor Aidan were still cursed by my video, it was not easy to use my powers on both of them at the same time. And as I wanted to possess Aidan, I had to focus my activity on him, to gather my energy around him, which meant being unable to keep projecting thoughts into Rachel's mind. But I accepted that, knowing it was only temporary. I knew I was going to be able to influence everyone around me as soon as Aidan's body became mine.

I realized that the first thing I had to do was to make his body physically weaker. That was a way to weaken his consciousness too, which was what I needed in order to replace it with mine. My action had to result in putting Aidan's consciousness to sleep, so that mine could take over his body. So while he was sleeping, I made his body secrete an enormous amount of cold sweat, which was going to give him hypothermia. That influence of mine was also projected onto his dreams. He was having a nightmare.

In that nightmare, he woke up in his bedroom after the TV set played a sudden loud noise. He got up from his bed and went to the living room, where he found the TV on, showing the static screen. He tried to turn it off with the remote controller, but it seemed to be impossible. So he walked closer to it, calling Rachel's name, scared by the TV's unusual behavior which reminded him of me. But Rachel wasn't there. When he approached the TV and tried to turn it off several times by pressing its power button, the well appeared on the screen and the portal to Terror's Realm was opened. At that moment the boy lost his nimbleness and started to crawl helplessly away from the TV, struggling to escape while water was leaking out of the couch in front of him and flooding the room. Suddenly he was disoriented by my power and started to crawl backwards while I was approaching him in my demonic form. My head and arms penetrated through the screen, grabbed his head and started to pull him into Terror's Realm. He started to shout Rachel's name, desperately trying to get out of my grip and in that moment he suddenly woke up from his nightmare, still yelling for Rachel.

It was already morning. The scream woke Rachel up too. She immediately ran to her child's room and gave him a tight motherly hug. My demonic soul was overwhelmed with that beautiful maternal love she felt for Aidan, when she told him that she would go down to his nightmare with him to protect him. But when she asked him what had happened in his nightmare, I used my influence on him to force him to lie. He said he didn't remember. At first I didn't want Rachel to know what I was doing to her child, because it could make her hate me.

Later that day, she took Aidan to the antique fair. He was feeling tired and cold all the time and she noticed something was wrong. But then he went to look around and take some random photos with his camera. While walking around, he suddenly noticed two deer in the distance. Those animals reminded me of an unpleasant memory I had left behind – Richard Morgan.

I recalled the deer bones I had seen a few times in the basement of the Morgan's house, while I had still been alive. Richard used to be a hunter before becoming a horse breeder. Influenced by me, Aidan started to feel nervous while observing those animals that reminded me of my hideous adoptive father. So he walked away.

He went to the restroom, he wanted to wash his hands. I disliked that room as soon as I saw it. Every single hole there was made for _water_! It reminded me of the way I had died in the well. Though, in that moment it gave me an idea of playing with Aidan's mind. I wanted him to know I was there, preparing to take over his body. But at the same time I was forcefully preventing him from letting Rachel know about that. That was a way to destabilize his consciousness more and make it easier for me to possess his body.

So at first I started playing with the faucet and a nearby pipe by using my telekinesis. When Aidan turned the faucet on to wash his hands, I shook the pipe on his right side, thus startling him. Then I made the water stop flowing, by which I prevented him from washing his hands. He was unable to get water from any of the faucets. Instead of water, I gave him a hallucination of a fly crawling out of a faucet pipe, thus reminding him of an image from my video. When the hallucinated fly flew away and disappeared from his sight, under my influence he walked to the mirror. When he looked at his reflection, I manifested myself to him. In the mirror he saw my demonic appearance shrunk to child size, standing behind him. Scared by that occurrence, he started to take photos of the mirror, to make proofs of my presence. But with every photo he took, I was using his body's energy to play with the taken photos, by modifying them with projected thermography, making myself look on them like a human girl instead of a demon. That action of mine was weakening his body, making him more and more exhausted and cold.

Suddenly Rachel found him in that restroom. She was confused by seeing him standing almost motionlessly in front of the mirror and taking photos of his reflection. When she put her hand on his back, she felt his coldness. She thought he was sick. As he confirmed feeling cold, she gave him another one of those heartwarming motherly hugs. That moment made me realize something – I didn't have to hide my activity from her. For a moment I had thought of using more of his energy to remove myself from the photos he had taken, but then I realized it wasn't necessary. Rachel loved Aidan, he was her only child. It was obvious she would have never given him up, not even if I had been in his body. But I was preventing him from mentioning me anyway. I kept doing that just to confuse him and destabilize his consciousness.

Rachel took her woolen scarf out of her purse and wrapped it around her child, before taking him to the car to drive home. While driving down a road in the forest, she started to ask him more about his sickness. But I forced him to say he had forgotten when it had started. I did that just to get him confused by the unreasonable and senseless urge to lie to his mother. She suspected it had to do with me, but I kept forcing him not to say anything.

But at that moment a deer suddenly started to cross the road and Rachel had to stop her car, to avoid hitting it. The presence of that animal reminded me of Richard again. Just the thought about that man, in spite of the fact he was dead, overwhelmed me with rage and the animal's sixth sense perceived my dark energy in Aidan's presence. I felt the anger growing in that deer upset by my negative energy. I was afraid of it getting violent and harming Rachel, or Aidan whose body I was intending to possess.

As I had been gathering my energy around Aidan in order to possess his body, I was unable to directly force Rachel to keep driving. She had just stopped the car, unaware of the danger. But I was aware of the danger, so I forced Aidan to tell her to keep driving. But she wasn't taking his words seriously, until the animal went mad enough and hit her car window with its forehead. Rachel reflexively ducked as the deer smashed the window and started to penetrate with its antlers into the vehicle. Suddenly another deer, which obviously also felt my dark energy, ran from the other side of the forest towards the car. Rachel noticed it and pulled Aidan down before the animal broke the window at his side. Those deer's violent acts finally made Rachel drive further and try to get away. On the way she ran over another running deer, whose body broke the front and the back glass of her car. But after that they managed to get away from the forest and they safely came home.

When they arrived, Rachel put Aidan to his bed and measured his body temperature. It was five degrees too low. Shocked by what she saw on the thermometer, she randomly raised her head and noticed the fishes in Aidan's aquarium. They were dead. Unlike the deer, those tiny creatures couldn't bear the dark energy surrounding the boy. Aidan felt too sick to even notice them being dead and Rachel didn't say anything because she didn't want to upset him more. She left his room to make a phone call, to ask for a medical advice.

But while she was on the phone, I made the power go out. The call was forcefully ended and the lights were turned off. Aidan was alone in his room. It was night. A perfect time to play a little more with him. Rachel started to call his name after realizing the power had gone out, asking him if he was alright. But he did not answer. He was unable to, because I was controlling him.

I started to make him think of my last living thoughts, the images from my video. That made him get out of bed and start scratching a wall, just like I had been scratching the inner wall of the well after realizing I had been unable to climb it up. As his consciousness was weakened, I was able to take the first step of possession. I projected my power of projected thermography into him. I needed his brain able to use that power, because his body was going to become mine. Aidan could feel what I was doing to him and deep inside he was struggling to fight me off.

As Rachel received no answer after calling for her child, she ran up to his room. But what she saw by coming there was not her boy. As he was struggling to push my influence away, he projected a hallucination into his mother's mind, to make her see what I was doing to him. So instead of Aidan, she saw _me _scratching the wall. She saw my demonic appearance in child size. It terrified her.

I was hurt by her reaction, but I knew she would just have to love me once I became the owner of her child's body. That was going to be the only way for her to keep something of her lost child close to herself.

When she saw me, she wanted to take her child out of the room and away from me, but then she noticed he wasn't in his bed. She turned to the wall again and realized that what she had seen there hadn't been really me, but her own child. Without knowing how influenced he was by me, probably thinking that my apparition was just a product of her tortured mind, she ordered him to get back in bed. But then he said he had seen something. As he randomly recalled the image of the burning tree among the other ones I had made him think of, it was automatically projected from his mind onto the wall, because he hadn't learned to control the power of projected thermography yet. Frightened by what she had just seen happening, Rachel took him out of the room. She went with him to her car and drove away to her office in Daily Astorian.

As they came there, she recalled burning one of my videotapes and started to wonder if I was causing Aidan's sickness to take a revenge for that. She told him about it and asked him if he knew anything. I forced him to stay quiet, just to torture his consciousness more. But as it hadn't been completely destroyed and as he had some of my powers, he was fighting me back and he managed to say something against my will. He said I could hear them all the time, except when they slept. The effects of my action had made him realize that. He had somehow figured out that I had the ability of projecting my thoughts into sleeping humans' minds in the form of nightmares, but that otherwise I had been unable to observe them in any of their dreams which hadn't been created by me. He said they had to sleep. However, that was what I needed to do. To put his consciousness to sleep.

At that moment their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a man named Max. He was Rachel's employer at Daily Astorian, very nice and friendly with her. But there was something about his friendliness that I disliked. He was too nice with her, I thought he wanted to seduce her. He reminded me too much of the deceased Noah. I immediately knew, if he didn't get away from her I was going to take him down as soon as Aidan's body became mine.

Max tried to make Aidan's acquaintance, but I prevented the boy from shaking hands with him. I disliked that man from the moment I'd seen him, so I wanted him as far away from Rachel as possible. But Rachel did just the opposite of what I wanted. She asked Max to let her and Aidan temporarily move to his house. She thought they could escape from me that way.

Probably being interested in her, Max gladly accepted to do her that favor. So he let them both in his car and drove to his house, where he and Rachel put Aidan to bed and covered him with a few blankets. I wondered how Rachel could think such a mundane thing could weaken my influence.

After Max left the room to prepare a warm bathtub for Aidan, Rachel promised her child they were going to leave Astoria and go far away, obviously thinking it would be helpful to get away from my multiplying videotapes. Nevertheless, I was one more time touched deep inside by the motherly hug she gave him afterwards.

When the bathtub was ready, she brought the boy there and removed the blanket he had been wrapped in, preparing him for the bath. But Aidan didn't want to enter the bathtub. Under my influence he was becoming afraid of water, that liquid that I hated because it reminded me of the way I had died in the well. However, Rachel managed to convince him to sit in the tub. But he couldn't relax in there, he was trembling in terror while the warm water was touching his body. It was even worse for him because his conscious mind couldn't understand that sudden fear of water.

But even though I hated water, at that moment it was increasing my influence over Aidan. That made me recall those days when I had been a newborn baby. Whenever Evelyn would have tried to bathe me, whenever the water would have touched my body, the demon in me had been growing stronger. Aidan was similar to how I had been back then. He was a weak and helpless kid with inhuman powers, surrounded by my dark energy which was growing stronger in water. Water was a mystical matter, hiding an evil force that normal humans were insensitive to. Only special ones could be influenced by it. Ones like Evelyn, like me, like Aidan.

After putting her child in the bathtub, Rachel left Max's place to get her and Aidan's possessions from her house. The boy was left alone with my influence and Max who, luckily for me, received a phone call several minutes later. Because of that call he neglected Aidan for a few minutes. That was a good moment to make Aidan's condition worse. At first I made the door close and lock up, to scare the boy and make it more difficult for Max to approach him. Although I hated water, I used Aidan's fear of it for my own purpose, by making the water flow faster and flood the bathroom. Not only the bathroom, it was flooding the entire floor of the house.

Not long after Max noticed the flood, Rachel came back. Max went to find something to break down the door and Rachel started to knock forcefully, requesting Aidan to unlock the door. But my influence over the boy was too strong for him to obey his mother. I was forcing him to keep sitting in the bathtub, in spite of his enormous fear. He was afraid of water, he was afraid of me, realizing that his interior struggles to fight me off were in vain. Along with his fear, the contradicting decision to keep sitting there in fetal position, forcefully projected by me into his mind, was severely destabilizing his consciousness.

But as my influence over him was growing stronger, so did his powers and in a moment he succeeded to use telekinesis to unlock the door. Rachel entered the flooded bathroom. She saw water scattering from the tub everywhere around the room, flooding the floor and getting accumulated on the ceiling at the same time. For a human being like her, that sight must have felt paranormal and eerie.

But when she approached the tub, Aidan used his powers to make her see my adult demonic arms wrapped around his body. Because of my influence he was unable to speak, but he could use projected thermography to show Rachel that he was struggling to fight me off. He showed her my adult, big form to make her see that my influence was growing. In return to that act of his, I left painful bruises on his body, in the area where he had made my arms be seen.

In that moment I heard Max coming back and I noticed an opportunity to distance him from Rachel, having predicted her reaction on what I was going to do. At first I influenced Aidan's eyes, making them look demonically pale for a second, which increased the terror that Rachel had already been overwhelmed with because of the water's unnatural behavior. At that moment, I also let all the water accumulated on the ceiling fall down. A huge amount of liquid fell over Aidan like a tsunami of fear, and Rachel suddenly got soaking wet. As my influence was growing along with Aidan's fear, I forced him to project a vision of me into Rachel's mind. So when she pulled her child out of the bathtub overfilled with water, she didn't see _him_. She saw _me_! My adult demonic form. Without being in that moment able to rationally realize that she was holding Aidan's body, she pushed him back down and started to drown her own child, believing that she was drowning me. It was all happening just as I had predicted.

At that moment Max arrived and saw Rachel drowning her own child to death. Terrified by that sight, he obviously started to doubt Rachel's sanity. That was what I wanted to do – to scare him off and decrease his interest in her. When I realized that he had seen her drowning Aidan, I stopped using my powers so explicitly. I didn't want Max to see any effect of my paranormal action. At that moment Rachel realized she was drowning her own child. She started to apologize desperately, terrified by what she had almost done.

Even against her will, unaware of what was really happening, Max took Aidan to the hospital. The doctors diagnosed the kid with severe hypothermia and sedated him to sleep. That was what I needed. His body was so weak because of the enormous hypothermia caused by me, and he was asleep. My goal was finally achieved, I became able to possess Aidan's body. So I put all my demonic energy together, leaving Terror's Realm and disappearing from all the places in the United States where I had my influence, and I accumulated all that energy in Aidan's weakened body, thus possessing it and having the boy's consciousness suppressed by mine and put to a long sleep.

While his body was still asleep due to the sedatives, I recalled my several months old foresight of having a human body again. I realized it hadn't been wrong, just like none of my foresights had ever been wrong. It had been telling me I was going to have Aidan's body. I figured that out when it finally became mine. I was him! I was Rachel's child, Rachel was my mother!

For a moment I thought of my tapes, wondering what was going to happen to their viewers, with me being alive and out of Terror's Realm. But I remembered that my curse still existed. Although they were not going to have hallucinations and nightmares, they were going to die in seven days unless they managed to make a copy and have someone else watch it. They might not see me before dying, but they were going to die anyway.

I also thought how bad it was not to be able to observe the events happening away from Aidan's body. But soon I realized it didn't matter anymore. I had a human body again. I was alive! Alive after dwelling around as a ghost for more than 24 years. And I was the biological child of a mother who loved her baby. But even though Aidan's body was mine, my consciousness wasn't asleep like the body. Nothing could change my inhuman nature. Just like I had never slept while living in the body of an eight years old girl, I was still awake in spite of my body being sedated.

In the dawn next day I saw my mommy coming to the room. She squatted down next to Aidan's body and asked him what could be done to stop me, reminding him that I couldn't hear him when he slept. As I had projected my powers into his body, I suddenly realized that his suppressed consciousness had the access to my memories and could send a message to my mommy. And I wouldn't be able to hear that message because I couldn't sleep. For a moment I was worried about that, but then I thought it didn't matter, because it seemed impossible to take that new body away from me. Though, Aidan did manage to grab my mommy's wrist and project some images into her mind. As he was asleep, I couldn't know what those images were.

Just a few seconds after he finished projecting images into my mommy's mind, she was joined by a woman that presented herself as Doctor Emma Temple. There was something about her that I immediately disliked. And soon I understood why. She started to subtly accuse my mommy for child abuse, convinced that Aidan's condition was her fault. Because of what she didn't know and didn't understand, she wanted to get my mommy away from Aidan's body, she wanted to separate her from me! I suddenly hated her, as much as I had hated Richard Morgan and his horses, when she pressed the alarm button, thus calling for some staff to take my mommy away. She blamed her for the hypothermia and for the bruises on Aidan's body, without knowing that both had been caused by me. Right before being forced to leave, my mommy leaned closer to my body and whispered in my ear something I really disliked to hear.

"You can't have him, Samara!" She said. "You're going back to where you came from!"

But nevertheless, I knew she was wrong. Aidan's body was mine.

When the sedatives' effect faded away, the body woke up. At that moment I felt an enormous twist in my mind, discovering the effect that the act of possessing a human body had had on me. It was something I hadn't known was going to happen. My consciousness got intertwined with Aidan's feelings. I felt myself being Samara, but I also felt the fear of water I had projected into Aidan. I felt Rachel's love for Aidan as if it was for me. In spite of what she had done to me, I felt loved by her. And I loved her back just the same. She was my mommy. Instead of remembering how she had burned three of my tapes and wanted to get away from me, I recalled the beautiful feeling I had been overwhelmed with when she had found my former body in the well. She had come to find me. That meant that she loved me. Or at least I thought so in that moment, while being unable to regard all the facts due to living in a stolen body.

When I opened my eyes, Doctor Temple was next to me. She started to ask me how I felt. But I only wanted to go home. I wanted to be with my mommy. That hideous woman lied to me, telling me that my mommy was on her way there, as if I didn't know how she had forced her out of the hospital. She also said I was cold, but I felt fine. My demonic soul was strong enough to live perfectly well in a hypothermic human body. So I ignored her annoying questions and just kept saying that I wanted to go home. But that stubborn woman was reluctant to let me go. Her behavior made me recall the time I had spent in the Eola hospital and being forcefully medicated there.

_Medications… Injection syringes… _As I recalled those items, I looked down and started to project thoughts into Doctor Temple's mind. I made her decide to take a syringe and inject air into her own aorta. That was going to be instant death.

"It won't stop!" I said while manipulating her to her demise, recalling the words I had said to Doctor Scott while talking to him about my powers, just a few minutes before taking his life away.

I could have used projected thermography to just force that woman to let me go. But that wasn't enough. She had to be punished for the way she had treated my mommy. So I put an end to her life! After that I took the wires of those hospital machines off my body and left the building without anyone's permission. I went to Max's house, where my mommy temporarily lived. On my way there I enjoyed the feeling of walking freely in a material body, after being a ghost for so many years.

When I came to the house, nobody was there. I was alone. So I sat down in the living room to watch TV while waiting for my mommy. But unfortunately, the first one to interrupt me wasn't her. It was Max. He still seemed just as interested in my mommy as before. For some reason, what I had made him see hadn't been enough for him to get away from her. She had probably told him something while my body had been asleep at the hospital. I especially thought so when he asked me if she had ever treated me as if I had been someone else. I just said I was nobody else but Aidan. It sounded quite strange and was a very unintelligent thing to say. But I was still unable to act completely lucidly and intelligently, due to living in a stolen body. That was why I was saying strange things. But I also told that obnoxious man that my mommy and I didn't need anyone else, neither him nor Doctor Temple. I wanted to have my mommy only for myself. Just like once I had wanted Anna.

Max intended to take a photo of me. That made me almost sure that my mommy had told him about what I had been doing to Aidan. But I didn't want him to take photos of me, I just wanted him to leave me alone. He promised not to take a photo of me, but I saw when he set the camera to take a photo on its own. What an underestimation of my intellect! That was it, I couldn't take it anymore. That was the moment for getting rid of that pesky man.

After setting the camera he sat next to me, wanting me to explain why I didn't want him to take any photos of me. But I just kept quiet, waiting a few seconds for the camera to trigger. When it happened, I knew that the taken photo was showing a normal Aidan, because I had decided not to let my any other form get captured.

But Max had to pay for underestimating me. So I used projected thermography on him, giving him a hallucination of Aidan's body transforming into my adult demonic form. I raised my head and showed him my wrinkled demonic face. The fate that befell Max was the same one that had befallen my first four victims, Noah, Jake and several more humans. His face got distorted in shock as its skin started to melt away. Terrified by my appearance, he used the last molecules of his strength to leave the house. I knew that his heart was going to stop beating in a few seconds, due to the telekinesis I was using on him along with the projected thermography. He passed away somewhere outside or maybe in his car if he had eventually tried to drive away from the house.

I felt so happy and relieved after his death. There was nobody left who I would have to share my mommy's attention with. I had eliminated even Aidan by possessing his body! Several months ago I had been so overwhelmed with Rachel's beautiful maternal feelings that I hadn't minded having Aidan as a brother. But nevertheless, it felt good to realize that he had been eliminated as well. He was asleep deep in my subconsciousness. I felt he had some dreams. I didn't know what he was doing in them, but I didn't worry too much. He had lost every chance to fight me off. Or at least I thought so.

It was night when my mommy arrived. Without expecting me there, she came in calling for Max, unaware of what had happened to him. Overwhelmed with excitement when she arrived, I ran to her and hugged her around the waist. I let myself get carried away by instincts and feelings for her, disregarding the fact I was acting completely unlike Aidan.

She realized she wasn't talking to her child at the moment I called her _Mommy_, unlike Aidan who had always called her by her name. But anyway, without giving her time to react on that, I grabbed her arm and directed her to the sofa, asking her to watch some TV with me. That was the first time I touched her with a hand of a living body. I didn't tell her how happy I was because of that. Though, I took her hand once again before she went to get something from the car, just to tell her how much I loved her.

When she came back, for some reason she didn't join me in watching TV. She went to her bedroom, without saying a single word. For a moment I thought she had encountered Max's corpse. But then I assumed she would have told me if it was that.

However, almost half an hour passed and she wasn't coming back. Then suddenly, I felt a significant increase of Aidan's activity deep inside me. He was asleep, so I couldn't know what he was doing in his dream. I just knew that he had suddenly become more active and I had a bad premonition about that.

I got up from the sofa and went to the bedroom, to see what my mommy was doing. I really disliked what I saw after opening the door. She was _sleeping_! I assumed she had fallen asleep unintentionally, since she was still in the same clothes she had been wearing by coming home.

My bad premonition about Aidan's activity finally made sense. I, being a sleepless projected thermographer, had the ability of projecting my thoughts as nightmares into a sleeping human's mind, but I wasn't able to observe a human in a dream not caused by me. Unlike me, Aidan was an asleep human soul with the power of projected thermography, which made him able to enter another sleeping human's dream. Thus, he had most likely entered my mommy's dream and talked to her. I was so angry at myself for not having figured out earlier that downside to providing Aidan with my powers.

As I couldn't know what they were talking about, I just had to stop them. So I slammed the door to wake my mommy up and kick Aidan's influence out of her head. I heard her gasping, startled by the door's sudden noise that had just woken her up. After waking her up, I just went back to the living room and sat in front of TV, pretending not to have moved from there since she had gone to the bedroom.

She joined me in a few minutes, saying she had woken up from a bad dream. Pretending not to know anything, I just asked her to stay with me. To stay with me _forever_. She said _yes_, so I asked her to watch TV with me. She said I should go to sleep, but then I told her I never slept. Then she said she was going to prepare me something to eat. Her attention felt so heartwarming that I forgot about what Aidan might have told her in the dream. I had never been happier before.

In several minutes she came back and sat next to me, handing me a plate with two jam sandwiches. I looked up to her face. She seemed to be extremely upset about something. I asked her what was wrong, but she said she was just tired. I wasn't sure if that was true, but there was nothing I could do to find out if she was lying. So I just told her I was there to protect her, before I started to eat the sandwiches she had made for me. But as soon as I ate half of one sandwich, I started to feel strange. I was losing my physical strength. The body was falling asleep!

At first I didn't know what was going on, but it soon became clear. Just a few minutes later, my mommy took my body, previously put to sleep by something she had probably put in the jam, and brought me to the bathtub. Everything made sense to me in that moment. Even though Aidan's consciousness had been suppressed by mine, he had figured out the way to force me out of his body. He must have entered my mommy's dream and told her what she had to do. The hideous kid had probably told her to take me to water because I was afraid of it, that the fear was going to weaken my power and force me out of his body.

I understood it when the body got in touch with water. That awful liquid already started to decrease my power and I found myself fighting Aidan's consciousness, struggling to keep his body. Due to that fight the body woke up and Aidan managed to speak to my mommy, letting her know it was him and not me. But a second later I took over and told her that I loved her. It was so unintelligent of me to let her know that my influence wasn't gone. But in such a moment of fear and despair it was impossible to think lucidly.

But my mommy ignored both Aidan's and my words and soaked my entire body in the water. Aidan had probably told her to drown him if that's necessary for forcing me out, even if it meant death for him. She did as her child had told her and I felt my influence over Aidan fading away. I felt the enormous fear of water I had projected into him. It was just too strong for me to fight it off.

I used the last seconds I could persist in his body to manipulate the water in the bathtub. It got contaminated with my soul manifesting itself to Rachel as black hair coming out of Aidan's mouth and rising up from the water with the rest of my apparition. There was only one word I managed to pronounce before completely losing my influence over Aidan – _Mommy_. As I pronounced it, my figure formed of water fell apart and flooded the bathroom.

I was a ghost again. Demonic ghost that immediately got sent back to Terror's Realm, the place where I had come from to possess Aidan's body. I found myself swimming in the well, in that part of a world built from my thoughts along with my original video. But I felt that the portal to the real world was opened. It had opened after Rachel managed to force me out of her child's body and it hadn't closed yet. So I climbed up the well. Unlike the real world, I could climb that thing in Terror's Realm. It was _my_ world after all.

While climbing up I realized there was no lid on the top of the Terror's Realm's well. So I used my powers to build one. It was materializing itself as I was climbing up, but it was only partially pulled over the well. I placed it that way so that I could get out.

After coming out, I started to walk to the portal, thinking of what I was going to do. I couldn't keep lying to myself, it was already obvious that Rachel didn't want me to be her child. But I wasn't giving up. She had to be mine, whatever it took. So I decided to suck her into Terror's Realm, to take her down to the well with me and use telekinesis to pull the lid up. That was what I had created the lid for. I knew that she, unlike Becca or Emily, wouldn't lose her sanity after seeing me emerge from the screen, because she had watched my video and saved herself from its curse. I knew, if I managed to do what I intended, she would be stuck in the well with me, just like that day when she had found my corpse, just with no Noah to set her free. We would be together forever!

While approaching the portal, I saw her and Aidan. I hated to see that the boy had survived. However, I stretched my hands forward and they penetrated through the screen of their TV set. Rachel grabbed them, intertwining her fingers with mine, trying to push me away. But I did completely the opposite of what she probably expected. Instead of struggling to come out, I held her hands firmly and jumped backwards down the well, thus sucking her into Terror's Realm and pulling her down with me. Our hands separated while we were both falling, but just a second later we were both in the well.

I started to climb up from the bottom. I needed to climb, so that my telekinesis could reach the lid and pull it over the well. But I was unpleasantly surprised when Rachel started climbing too. So I started to climb faster, intending to reach her and take her down again. She was climbing as fast as she could, struggling to get away from me. But I was a little faster than her. After all, she hadn't had any experience in climbing a well. Just at the moment when the upper part of her body came out, I finally grabbed her foot. But she forcefully tore my hand off and ripped a rock out of the inner wall with her foot. Water started to fall over me and I was knocked down to the bottom.

But I started to climb up again. Even though she had almost come out of the well, I knew it was going to take her long to realize how to escape Terror's Realm. I had enough time to get her down again. So I was climbing restlessly, shouting after her, calling her _Mommy_. After everything she had done to me, I still wanted her to be my mother. But what she did after managing to leave the well was the last thing I expected. She ran to the lid and pushed it over the well, thus sealing me inside and pronouncing the last words I ever heard her say:"I'm not your fucking mommy!"

I was defeated. I not only lost my last chance to keep Rachel close to myself, but I was also sealed in a well again. That time in Terror's Realm, in that world created by me. But it was different from being stuck in the real well. After dying there, I had become an immaterial ghost, able to fly out of that hole. Unlike that, I was a material being in Terror's Realm, at least just as material as everything around me that I had built from my thoughts. There was no dying there. I was condemned to spend the entire sleepless eternity in that dark place, unless somehow someone came and set me free. I was unable to destroy the lid. In Terror's Realm I could use my powers to build, but not to destroy.

I couldn't push the lid away with telekinesis either. Up to that moment I had thought it had been possible. I had done it once as a ghost, from the outside while Rachel had been looking for my corpse. But from the inside it was too heavy, even for supernatural powers of an inhuman demon like me. There was no way out. I was stuck in the well.

Not much later, I sensed the closing of the portal to the real world. Rachel had probably already figured out how to leave and she had probably returned to Aidan. I realized I could have used projected thermography to force her to open the well while she was still there, but I had just been too upset by her running away from me and too shocked by the words she had said to me before pushing the lid on.

After spending just a few hours stuck in the well, I found myself loathing motherhood. I remembered all my mothers. Evelyn, Anna, Rachel. Evelyn and I had had to be separated because I had been forcing her to kill me. Anna had loved her husband's horses and she hadn't been willing to pay her full attention to me. And Rachel... she had only wanted me to go away since the moment I had killed that hideous man Noah. _A man! Again!_ A man defeated me. I had been losing Anna's attention due to Richard and his horses, and I had lost Rachel's love because of Noah.

All that time I had spent yearning for Rachel I had been lying to myself, influenced by my own emotions, believing there was a way to make her love me again. I obviously wasn't destined to have a mother. So I started to hate motherhood with all the powers of my cold inhuman soul, wishing for all the mothers on Earth to be unhappy with their children for the rest of their lives. I was wondering why my demonic father hadn't killed that human part of me by possessing my body. I kept asking myself why it had left me with the ability of loving a human being as a mother.

But it didn't take me long to figure out the answer. Probably just a few days later, I sensed the new opening of the portal between Terror's Realm and reality. I realized what was going on. A person who had watched my video didn't manage to produce a copy and make someone else watch it. So the portal opened a few seconds before the death of that person. Although I did not know who it was, I started to project my thoughts through the portal right into the person's mind, forcing that person to approach the TV, to enter my world through it and to push the lid of the well off.

I started to climb up while the person was probably obeying my orders as if they were coming from their own mind. So I was right under the lid when it got pushed away and I saw a young adult woman who had come to rescue me, without knowing what she was doing. As soon as I came out and she saw my demonic face projecting my dying thoughts into her mind, her facial skin started to melt away as her scream echoed down Terror's Realm. But there was no _Thanks _to be heard from me. Instead of that, I grabbed her trembling body and ejected it out through the portal before it closed. I knew that she was going to die in a few seconds.

That was the moment when I figured out why I had been left with the ability of loving a motherly figure after my body had got possessed by the demon. It had been necessary for me to fulfill my destiny. And my destiny was to torture mankind. If I hadn't been addicted to a motherly figure, I wouldn't have tortured Anna and she would have never thrown me down the well. I wouldn't have died and become a demonic ghost, I wouldn't have been found by Rachel and become enormously powerful. I wouldn't have been able to be at countless places at the same time due to my multiplying videotapes and their deadly influence. I wouldn't have been capable of torturing humans with visions, hallucinations and nightmares, and even possessing if I wanted. And if I hadn't been so devastatingly disappointed by Rachel, my hatred for mankind wouldn't have grown _that _strong and torturing humans wouldn't have felt so immensely pleasant for me.

I had sometimes acted truly illogical. I could have prevented Richard and Anna from leaving me at Eola County Psychiatric Hospital. I could have found a way to run away from there. I could have prevented Richard from locking me up in the barn or at least I could have got out of there by forcing him to let me out or by telekinetically unlocking the door. That way I would have been able to spend time with Anna instead of focusing my energy on driving the horses to death, while allowing my hideous adoptive father to keep me in that disgusting place. I could have forced the two of them to get me out of the well after they had thrown me down, while I had still been alive. I could have found a way to prevent Rachel from leaving my tape at the video store. Six months later, while living in Aidan's body, I could have acted more like him, I could have convinced her I was him. Also, after pulling Rachel into Terror's Realm, I could have forced her to stay there with me.

But I did nothing of that. I had been manipulated by my demonic possessor living in my subconsciousness. That demon had known from the same beginning very well what it had been doing. It had been leading me through my entire life and afterlife to the magnification of my doomful powers and to the culmination of my hatred for mankind. My powers and my hatred – that was what I needed to torture the hideous human race and to enjoy every single bit of my actions with the full depth of my cursed demonic soul.

So the ring went on. More and more of my videotapes were produced, more and more humans were watching them. The area of my influence was growing wider, and the number of humans suffering because of my vicious activity was growing exponentially.

Everything was normal, until one of my videos was watched by an unusual young adult man, who wasn't afraid of my influence at all. Instead of being afraid, he watched my tape with an intention that no one had ever had before – on purpose of _meeting me_. The name of that man was Seth McWilson.

Suddenly, I found myself gasping in horrifying fatigue, having woken up from a long dream, or trance or something similar. My body was shivering in the coldness of that world called Terror's Realm. My back was still leaning against the well and Samara was sitting next to me.


	9. Chapter 7

_After being led through Samara's entire past, Seth McWilson comes back to his senses, to bring us to the conclusion of the story he introduced us to. Seems like he managed to survive the curse of the tape against the rules. But is his life ever going to be the same again? This final chapter of the story reveals the answer to that question!_

* * *

**The friendship**

It took me a minute to figure out what had just happened. The first fact I realized after my gasps of shock calming down, was that my name was Seth McWilson. An unknown amount of time ago, I had been sucked into a virtual world called Terror's Realm, built from the thoughts of a demonic ghost called Samara Morgan, the same ghost that I had been brought there by.

I recalled meeting Samara seven days after watching her tape, getting sucked into Terror's Realm and spending a few minutes talking to her. Then she had started to use her supernatural power called projected thermography, to project all her memories into my mind. For me it had felt like a very long dream. Or like a trance, or even like a coma. I didn't know how much time had passed while she was doing that to me, but I knew that her paranormal influence had just made my consciousness go through more than 32 years of a life that wasn't mine. I had been through her entire life and afterlife, from birth to death, from death to the day of meeting me. At the moment when I appeared in the memories she was projecting into my mind, she stopped it and then I came back to my senses, figuring out that I was myself and not her after all.

But I could still recall the feelings of everything she had been through. I could recall the experience of her fear of the demon possessing her, which ended up with her surrendering to it, just like the experience of her pure feelings for Evelyn, for Anna and for Rachel, just like her dark hatred for Richard, Noah, Max and Aidan, all those humans that prevented her from finding her vicious happiness next to a motherly figure. I found myself sympathizing with her and understanding her very well, comprehending her hatred for motherhood, just like her hatred for all of mankind. I could relate to her so much.

She was still sitting by my left side against the well. She didn't say a word after seeing me wake up and gasp. She was just staring at me with her expressionless demonic face. Fingers of our hands were still intertwined together. That made me think it had actually taken me quite a short time to live through all her memories.

When I turned to her, I started to wonder about what I was seeing right in front of me. I wasn't able to perceive her as just a ghost of a little girl who had died years ago. No, she was definitely not a kid. But I couldn't think of her as an ordinary adult human either, or anything in between. She was simply a phenomenon, she was something wonderful, something that none human had ever seen before. The ones who had seen her wrinkled face and died after that, they actually saw nothing. They only saw an undead human, without knowing she was a lot more than that. Nobody had ever seen her as what she really was, as the perfection of wonderful evil capable of exterminating mankind, that awful virus of Earth.

"Samara...?" I started to talk to her, several seconds after coming to myself and realizing what had happened.

She did not say a word. She was just staring at me speechlessly, still keeping her fingers intertwined with mine.

"How did I survive?" I asked, having found myself truly wondering about that after coming to know the truth about her curse.

"You were the only one." She suddenly spoke to me in her demonic voice. "The only one who watched the video with the purpose of meeting me. You wanted to have me around. You were not afraid."

That was true. I was not afraid. But at that moment I recalled her asking me why I had been the only one saved and I suddenly found myself confused.

"Eh, you _do _know?" I asked. "But before you started leading me through your memories, you had asked me that same question. Remember?"

"I was surprised." She explained. "But I thought of it. It makes sense."

"Oh..." I nodded. "And... You were sometimes showing yourself to your victims during their seven days. How come I didn't see you a single time before the deadline moment?"

"You _wanted _to see me." She noted. "I was curious about you. I wanted to know you better, by seeing you acting naturally. I didn't want to influence your behavior by making you feel observed by me. So I never showed myself to you before the time."

"I understand." I nodded again as everything I had been confused about finally made sense.

A few seconds of silence again. Unusually awkward silence. Then I decided to be the one to break it.

"Samara..." I spoke to her again, moving a few centimeters closer to her and putting my right hand over hers. "Thank you! Thank you for letting me know everything about you!"

"Don't thank me." She said indifferently.

"I want you to know... that I understand you better than ever, better than I've ever understood anyone." I added.

She didn't say a word. She was just mysteriously staring at me.

"Well, as the misanthrope that I am, I could understand everyone holding a grudge against mankind." I continued. "But you... Now I know what happened to you. I understand you so well. I understand your reasons for feeling that way. You suffered a lot, and..."

"You do not think I deserved to suffer?" She unexpectedly interrupted me.

"It doesn't matter!" I said. "Besides that, nothing would have happened if you hadn't got possessed by a demon. And that was not your fault."

"That demon is me!" She said. "By possessing me, it became a part of me. I accepted it. I traded my humanity for power!"

"No, you were unable to fight it off!" I contradicted her. "It was stronger than you and it was manipulating you all the time."

"However, I am what I am. Nobody forces me to torture mankind. I do it because I want to. I _want_ to fulfill my destiny."

"Well, regardless of circumstances, your pain is a fact. So I can really understand how you feel. Especially about that woman Rachel. How she disappointed you."

"Do not mention her name!" She muttered almost angrily.

"I'm sorry!" I apologized. "But may I ask, how come you didn't take a revenge on her?"

"She left the American continent with her kid." She explained. "Now she is really far away from my influence."

"But you can possess a person who has recently watched your tape and find her, can't you?"

"I do not want to possess again. It felt very twisting the last time I did it. I don't know what effect it could have on my consciousness. But my tapes will reach her, sooner or later."

"And what are you going to do once you find her?" I was curious.

"You really want to know?" She asked mysteriously.

"Yes, I do." I nodded determinedly.

"I think you don't." She contradicted me.

"Of course I do!" I was persistent. "Samara, I truly understand your dark feelings. I can relate to them very well and I _admire_ you. I'm fascinated by what you are! So whatever you're going to do to that woman, even if you're intending to kill her, I'll understand."

"I'm not going to kill her." She answered. "I'm going to kill her child."

I was really darkly impressed by her words. It was true that, as much of a misanthrope I was, I had never thought of killing an innocent child. But I couldn't judge Samara for that. After everything she had been through, I could perfectly understand her desire to take Aidan's life and leave Rachel in the endless agony for the rest of her life.

I just nodded to her. Both of us were quiet for several seconds afterwards.

"And what happened to you?" All of a sudden she broke the silence by asking me a question.

I found myself almost shocked by that. Fascinated, flattered by the idea of someone like her being really interested in knowing anything about me.

"Oh, what do you mean?" I asked.

"Why are you holding a grudge against mankind?"

"You... don't know?" I was kind of confused.

"I may be a projected thermographer, but I am not clairvoyant like Evelyn." She said, thus letting me know she wasn't familiar with my past.

"And you... truly _want_ to know?" I asked, flattered.

"Be yourself, Seth!" She said. "You are not a shy person."

"How do you know?"

"Because I observed you during your seven days, as I said." She explained. "Will you answer my question?"

"Oh, of course!" I nodded, smiling at her. "But... it's a long story. Are you really interested in hearing everything?"

"It's not longer than mine." She said. "You can start."

"Alright!"

She got quiet and her face was still expressionless. But I could figure out she was listening to me carefully.

"There were... many things." I started to tell her the true story of my life, constantly looking at her face and watching her listening to me. "Not long before my birth, my parents made a big wealth with the business they run. They have always been completely dedicated to that business and they have never spent much time with me. They have always been neglecting me. In spite of all the money we have, the only things they have bought for me were stuff like expensive clothes, expensive mobile phones, an expensive car... Things that I never truly cared about. And they were not buying them for me to make me happy. No, it was just to make me look worthy of being a part of their family and to have a good reputation in the society. Goddamn society! A few times I tried to tell them that I never cared about that stuff, that I was interested in completely different things. But they would always tell me off in a very rude way. I often wondered why my parents acted that way with me, as if they didn't care about me at all. And once, I accidentally found out."

I stopped there for a moment and looked at Samara's face. She was still listening very carefully. I was flattered by seeing her truly interested in hearing my story.

"Once I accidentally overheard one of their discussions." I continued. "And after that, everything made sense to me. I found out that they never really wanted to have a child. I was... an _accident_! My father wanted my mother to have an abortion. She actually wanted to get rid of me too, but she was afraid. She had heard about several cases of abortion that resulted in the mother's death. They were even thinking about giving me for adoption, but it was unacceptable for someone on their social level. That's why I exist and that's why I'm here. I have never let them know that I overheard that conversation. It would be too pathetic to just come and reproach them. Instead, I decided to take a nasty revenge on them. I hate them!"

"And what have you done to them?" She asked me.

"Nothing yet." I sighed bitterly. "I'm still looking for a perfect punishment for them. I want to make them regret their own existence! But I don't know how. If I did to them what I'd really like to do, I would become a criminal. And I don't want to go to jail."

She slowly nodded after what I said.

"And you know, what parents have done to me is not the only shit that I've been through in these twenty years of my life." I continued and she kept listening to me. "I have always been different from the others. I'm a freak! Sometimes I even think I'm cursed because I _happened _accidentally, because my parents never wanted to have a child."

I noticed some unspoken curiosity on her face. She didn't ask anything after what I said, but I felt she wanted to know more.

"I always loved horror." I explained. "Horror films, books, games, comics, action figures... I was seven when I came across that world, when I watched my first horror movie. That was _The Exorcist_. But instead of getting frightened like any normal kid, I loved that movie. I discovered my lifelong hobby, my eternal obsession. Horror! I especially like paranormal things like ghosts, demons, Satan... I haven't performed any satanic rituals or anything like that, but that stuff does fascinate me. When I told my parents I'd like to collect horror merchandise instead of stupid expensive clothes, they told me off. I was unable to start my collection until I started to receive pocket money, at my age of 13. And you know, parents haven't been the only ones giving me shit because of what I liked. I was also bullied at school. Other boys of my ages loved sports. Another thing I hate because it's boring to death! When they heard I liked horror films, the good kids got frightened by me and the bad ones started to bully me. They were calling me names of famous horror characters they had heard about. They were calling me Freddy, Jason, Chucky... Those morons had no idea what they were talking about! They had just heard those names without having watched those movies, without knowing what are those characters like, so they were giving me those nicknames just because they belonged to the horror genre. The only cool nickname I got, although it was also meant to be derogative, was Lucifer. There was a lot of mockery and even physical violence at school. Once I was punished because I exaggerated in self defense. One moron managed to secretly bring a knife to school and he attacked me with it during a break. During the physical fight with him, I took the knife out of his hand and stuck it in his eye. I was suspended after that. Of course, it gave me additional crap with parents. The parents of the moron who had attacked me intended to sue me. Mine moved their influences to avoid that. But they didn't do that to save _me_, of course! They did it to save themselves from a scandal. However, after that incident they moved me to another school. There was fortunately not so much violence and things seemed to be better. Girls seemed to be interested in me. I was 14 when I fell in love for the first time, with a girl named Gale. We had a romantic relationship for something more than one year. Until I found out she had many other boyfriends. She was interested in me only because I was rich. She thought that I would never find out about her cheating on me and that in a few years, when we got a little older, I would start buying expensive jewelry for her and so on. And that shit went on, every girl who has ever been interested in me, was actually interested in my money, which I always hated because of what parents were doing to me. And up to today, I think I've found only one real friend. His name is David. I think he is the only human who truly appreciates me for what I am."

At that moment I stopped talking. I didn't know what else I could say about my boring life. Samara didn't say a word either. Her face was expressionless and I suddenly found myself feeling ridiculous.

"I know what you're thinking." I continued a few seconds later. "You must think I'm a lame and ridiculous whiner. After all, what happened to me is insignificant compared to everything that you've been through."

"No." She surprised me with the negative answer.

"No?" I repeated. "How come? I'm aware that my life has been a paradise compared to yours, it's a fact."

"Everyone knows their pain and their disappointments." She explained. "And every grudge born out of that is understandable."

"Thank you!" I nodded and then we found ourselves in another episode of awkward silence. She was quiet and I didn't know what else to say. As much as I admired her, I didn't know what to talk about to an entity like her. But a few seconds later, the freezing cold atmosphere around me reached my consciousness again and I started to think of the place where I was sitting next to Samara – _Terror's Realm_! I knew I was supposed to be dead, because I had watched her video and hadn't shown it to anyone. I was alive instead, but not in a normal place. I was... in Terror's Realm.

I suddenly started to wonder if there was a way out, if I was going to be let out alive by that... child from Terror's Realm. I wondered if Samara was going to let me stay alive after what I had done to her, or was she going to punish me for surviving her curse against the rules.

In that dead silence between us, without knowing what to do, I stood up. The rocks of the well had felt really uncomfortable behind my back.

"Where are you going?" Samara asked, standing up and coming after me as I started to walk.

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I wonder... What's going to happen with me? With... us?"

"What do you want to say?" She asked.

"Well, I'm alive." I started to explain myself, having turned to her. "But I'm here. With you. Is there a way out of here? Am I going to come out of here... alive?"

"You _are _alive." She interrupted me.

"Is my life ever going to be the same?"

"Do you really want it to be the same?" She asked, leaving me quite confused with that question.

"What... do you mean?" I asked.

"You watched my video because you wanted to meet me. You got what you wanted and you survived. You claim that you admire me. Now, you want your life to be the same? Just like you never had this experience?"

"I really don't know what can happen." I shrugged again. "If I get out of here alive, I assume it _is _going to be the same."

"It is going to be the same." She confirmed. "But only if that's what you want."

She was talking so mysteriously, intriguing and fascinating me more and more.

"But what..." I stammered. "What else can happen?"

"You survived your seven days." She started to explain. "You can dispose of my tapes and never see me again. Live your regular, helplessly resentful life."

"Or... what else can I do?" I asked.

When I asked that question, she grabbed my wrist. One more time I felt the damp, freezing cold touch of her undead demonic hand.

"You can keep me." She answered, staring powerfully at my eyes. "If you want, I can stay next to you. I can help you force the humans of your world to do everything you want. I can help you punish the ones who neglected you, the ones who hurt you. All those who made your soul so similar to mine. Just if you decide to keep the connection with me and allow me to have my influence on your surroundings, even beyond your seven days."

"And I can travel and help you find... that woman whose name you don't want to hear from me. I can help you take your revenge."

"In return I can protect you from every foe you may encounter."

"And I can make tons of copies of your tape and spread them around. I can trick people into watching them." I smirked by just imagining that.

"Everyone will suffer!" She let a whisper of her demonic voice.

"That's precisely why I cherish this alliance between us that has just commenced." I firmly said, taking her hand between mine.

"Now I understand." She said, still being so mysterious. "Now I can see that you are what my soul has needed all this time."

"Oh, what are you referring to?" I asked, proudly smiling at her words.

"All my life and afterlife I was looking for a motherly figure." She started to explain. "But that was just a game that my psyche was playing on me. It was all because motherly love was the only positive feeling that once had been felt for me by a human. Evelyn loved me, before I forced her to try to kill me. And all this time, until getting abandoned by Rachel, I was looking for motherly love, convinced that it was what I needed. My demon possessor knew how confused I was and it was using that confusion for increasing my powers and my resentment. But now I see that I just needed someone who would really want to have me around, with everything that I am. I used to torture Anna with my powers, thinking I was doing it just to punish her for not paying her full attention to me all the time. I was using much less powers on Rachel, convinced it was just because everything she was doing was for her child. But there were more reasons. I was doing it to Anna, not only to punish her and not only because I was manipulated by the demon. I was also doing it because I needed to show her what kind of creature I really was. I wanted her to love me just the way I was. And it didn't happen. Rachel knew who I was, it was not necessary to keep reminding her of my inhumanity. And she rejected me. Of course, it was all a part of the trip to my grudge and my powers reaching this level. But with you it's so different. You know the inhuman demon that I am and you want to have me around."

"I do." I agreed, nodding to her. "I want to have you around, I want us to bring mankind down together. I want you to be my friend."

"I _am _your friend, Seth." She confirmed. "I'm going to stay next to you forever. I am your friend, your accomplice."

As she said that, we gave each other a tight hug of eternal friendship and vicious alliance. I felt her freezing, almost painful coldness penetrating through my skin into my blood when we wrapped our arms around each other's back. I felt her soul, her power and her energy entering me and overwhelming me with the dark excitement of everything we could do together to that hideous world of human creatures.

"I am so glad for having met you, my friend from Terror's Realm!" I said, smiling to her as our eyes met again.

"Now it's time for you to leave." She said.

She didn't express being glad to have met me too. But I knew she was. Expressing it would just be too much unlike her. As if she hadn't already acted a lot unlike herself since the moment of our meeting.

"Well, where is the way out?" I asked, almost laughing at my own question.

"You know what Evelyn said." She reminded me. "Water. Water is the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead."

"But... I am alive." I was confused.

"I am dead." She explained. "Terror's Realm is my world. You're returning to the world of the living, through water."

"But that is not the way you emerge from a screen, is it?" I asked, recalling her experience of showing herself to her victims.

"No. As you remember, I use my metaphysical portal, invisible in Terror's Realm. That can't be your way out because you're a living human. You're going back through water."

"I see." I nodded. "So, I have to jump down the well?"

"Not that water." She said, pointing to the forest of leafless birch trees. "There, on the other side. There is a cliff. Jump down from it and you will be back to your world."

"Thank you!" I smiled, nodding to her. "See you!"

"Anytime!" She answered as I started to walk to the trees.

But before entering the forest, I turned back to her. She was still standing next to the well and watching me going to leave her world. She smiled at me. That was the first time I saw a smile on that admirable demonic face.

Then I turned to the forest again and started to walk. Very soon I found myself surrounded by the trees, having lost Samara and the well from my sight. But I just kept walking my way.

After just a few minutes of walk I got out of the forest and found myself on the cliff that Samara had mentioned. Just as I had assumed, it was the place where Anna Morgan had committed suicide. I recognized it from the memories projected into my mind by Samara.

I felt the cold breeze blowing through my veins when I stood on the edge of that cliff. I started recalling images from the tape, including the one of Anna throwing herself down into the ocean. It was up to me to do the same to leave Terror's Realm.

So I did it. I relaxed my limbs and threw myself down, starting to feel the cold air penetrating through my vertically falling body while I was observing the merciless water of the ocean approaching my eyes.

But I never felt the touch of that water that was probably just as cold as the rest of Terror's Realm. At the moment I was supposed to touch it, I found myself laid on the floor of my living room. Colors finally returned to my sight as I left Samara's monochromatic realm. My entire body and the clothes on me were soaking wet. I felt so different from how I had felt before meeting Samara and getting sucked into Terror's Realm. But it wasn't because of being wet. I felt different because I could sense her presence. I knew she was next to me, although my eyes were unable to see her at the moment. I knew she was there, ready to be my friend, my accomplice in turning the human world into a freezing hell. To stay next to me for a lifetime and beyond.

As I got up from the floor, I looked at the clock on the wall. It was 7:30 PM. And it was still raining heavily. I really hadn't spent a long time in Terror's Realm.

_THE END_

* * *

_**You who have read this story are fated to die at this exact hour seven days from now. If you do not wish to die, you must make a copy of this text and give it to someone else to read.**_


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